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NEW YORK: 

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1891, 

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In the Oflace of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 




CONTENTS. 


CHAPTEB PAGE 

I. — At the Hospital 5 

11. — Sister Philomene 12 

in. — Professional Dritisism 7O 

IV. — Agreeably Surprised 84 

V. — Praying in Vain 88 

VI. — The Morning Ministrations 90 

VII. — A Firm Serenity 94 

VEIL — Acquiring Courage 97 

IX. — A Hard Case 100 

X. — Expressions of Gratitude 103 

XI. — Necessary Qualities 109 

Xn. — “God Will Keward You.” II4 

XIII. — Hymn of Triumph II9 

XIV. — Exacting a Promise 122 

XV.— Exchange of Thoughts 125 

XVI. — Keminiscences 127 

XVII. — Her Sister’s Jest 129 

XVIII.— One’s Duty 131 

XIX.— In the Woods m 

XX. — “I Am to Remain.” I35 

XXI. — Sealing His Lips 136 

XXII. — The Value of Prayers 138 

XXin. — Thoughts of Marriage 140 

XXIV.— Absent ]42 

XXV. — The Children’s Hospital I43 

XXVI. — Love 145 

XXVII. —The Remedy I49 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTEB PAGE 

XXVIIL— Troubled Dreams 151 

XXIX.— A Sudden Terror 153 

XXX.— First Love UO 

XXXI.— Not Always Fun ^ 162 

XXXII. — Persuasion 165 

XXXIII.— “Better to Have Died.” 168 

XXXIV. — The Professor’s Admonition 171 

XXXV.— Hopeless 173 

XXXVI.— Delirium .* 174 

XXXVH.- The Gathering in the Ward 176 

XXXVIII.— On the Stretcher 185 

XXXIX.— “What’s the Matter With You?” 187 

XL. — Barnier’s Pentinence 196 

XLI. — A Slave to Absinthe 199 

XLII. — Sign of Death 203 

XLIII.— “Kill Myself !” 205 

XLIV. — Alarmed 208 

XLV. — The Constant Struggle 211 

XLVI. — Philomene’s Inquiry 213 

LXVII. — Thoughts of the Past 214 

XL VIII. — Asking Forgiveness 219 

XLIX. — Materialism 220 

L.— Dying 225 

LI.— “What Is It You Want?” 227 

LII. — The Death-Kattle 231 

LHI.- The Lock of Hair 233 


SISTER PHILOMENE 


CHAPTER I. 

AT THE HOSPITAL. 

ward is vast and lofty, stretching out and 
disappearing in the distance into endless gloom. 

It is night. A couple of stoves throw a red glare 
from their open grates. At intervals the faint and 
fading glimmer of night-lights casts a streak of 
fire across the shining floor. Beneath the flickering 
and uncertain light the curtains to the right and 
left faintly gleam and whiten against the walls; 
the beds stand out vaguely — rows of beds with half- 
shadowy outlines dimly revealed through the dark- 
ness. At the further end of the ward something 
lightens the depths of blackness, something that 
bears the semblance of a plaster Virgin. 

The atmosphere is warm, a damp warmth heavy 
with a faint odor, a sickly smell of heated oint- 
ment and boiled linseedr^^ 

All is hushed. Hot a sound nor a movement is 


6 


AT THE HOSPITAL. 


heard. Night and silence reign over all. From 
time to time the stillness is almost imperceptibly 
broken by a rustle of sheets, a smothered yawn, a^.^ 
half -suppressed groan, a gasp ; then the ward again 
relapses into a dull,mysterious peace. 

/^V^t a little distance a stout young woman, her hair 
ruffled with sleep, rouses herself from the big, 
white-covered arm-chair in which she has been 
dozing, while her feet rest on the rung of a small 
chair in front of her, which is faintly lit up by a 
hand-lamp placed on it, together with a small 
prayer-book. She passes like a shadow across the 
lamp-light, goes up to a stove, takes a poker from 
the hot ashes, stirs and pokes the coals two or three 
times, then returns to her arm-chair, replaces her 
feet on the bar of the chair, and again stretches 
herself out. 

The stirred-up fire gleams more vividly. The 
night-lights, each in its glass cup, hanging from 
curved iron brackets, flicker and brighten up. The 
glimmer from the wicks rises and falls like a 
regular breath on the luminous and transparent oil, 
and the shades swaying to the motion of the flame 
cast on the beams of the ceiling great shadows of 
ever moving and agitated circles. Beneath, to the 
right and left, the light falls softly from the sus- 
pended glasses onto the foot of the beds, on the 
bands of plaited linen at their head, and over the 
curtains, throwing slanting shadows across bodiea-s/ 
huddled up under counterpanes. Shapes and out- 


AT THE HOSPITAL. 


7 


lines quiver dimly in the uncertain light that sur- 
rounds them, while between the beds the high win- 
dows, thinly curtained, admit the bluish twilight 
of a clear, cold, winter sky. 

The night-lights mark the receding perspective, 
and the outlines grow dim and blurred as they are 
gradually lost in darkness. In the intervening 
spaces, where the light of one ceases and that of the 
next barely glimmers, great black shadows rise up 
. and meet at the ceiling, throwing a vail of dark- 
ness over both sides of the ward. Further on the 
eye catches sight of a confused whiteness, and 
then again all is dark, a dense, opaque darkness, 
in which all is swallowed up. 

^^Out of the thickest of the gloom, at the very end 
of the ward, a glimmer is seen, a speck of fire ap- 
pears. A light coming from afar moves forward 
and increases like the distant light in a dark land- 
scape toward which the traveler gropes at night. 
The light draws near ; now it is behind the great 
glass door that closes the ward and separates it 
from the next one ; it lights up the archway, shines 
through the glass panels, then the door opens, and 
a candle and two women in white make their ap- 
pearance. 

“Ah! the mother going her rounds,” murmurs a 
^tient, half awake, closing her eyes and turning 
away from the light. 

The two white-clad women move along slowly and 
gently. They walk so softly that their footsteps 


8 


AT THE HOSPITAL. 


are scarcley heard on the polished tiles. They ad- 
vance with the candle before them like phantoms 
in a ray of light. 

The one on the side nearest the beds walks witl^^ 
her hands crossed. She is young. Her counte- 
nance is sweet and calm, and she has a peaceful 
smile such as dreams silently impress on a sleeping 
face. She wears the white vail of a novice. Her 
woolen dress, which seems yellow when contrasted 
with the cold whiteness of the sheets and bed covers, 
is the white robe of the Sisters of Saint Augustine. 

By the side of the sister steps the serving-maid 
of the community, in a white bodice, white petti- 
coat, and night-cap. She it is who carries the 
candle, and the light falling on her face lends to 
her complexion the dull ivory color of some ancient 
abbess standing out of the dark background of an 
old portrait, 

"^ As the women pass along, the light penetrates 
through the half-drawn curtains, lights up the beds, 
and displays for a moment the open mouth, the 
pinched nostrils, the head thrown back on a pil- 
low, of some slumbering woman, or passes over the 
thin face of a patient who has dragged her kerchief 
over her eyes and holds her sheet up to her mouth 
with her fist tightly closed against her cheek ; or, 
again, it glances over the raised hoop that supports 
the counterpane at the foot of a bed, or vaguely in- 
dicates by the molding of the sheets the graceful 
outline of a slumbering young woman as she lies 


AT THE HOSPITAL. 


9 


with her left arm thrown up and encircling her hair, 
palQ as a ghost in the surrounding gloom. 

/^The sister casts a glance on the sleeping forms ; 
to those awake she nods, smiles a good-night, goes 
up to their side and gently tucks up the bed-clothes 
and raises their pillows. 

^As she passes, an inarticulate sound, a grumbling 
moan, an angry groan, issues from one of the beds. 
The sister goes up to it. She raises the old woman 
in her arms, soothes her by a few soft words uttered 
in a musical voice, the coaxing voice that mothers 
and nurses assume to make naughty children obey. 
Then she turns the patient, bending tenderly over 
her back, and mis-shapen form. She moves the poor 
old thing’s emaciated and bony legs aside, and ar- 
ranges and smooths the sheets. In answer to her 
caressing voice, to her light, delicate touch, the 
patient only gives vent to an impatient grumble, 
an animal-like growl. 

“You shall have a poultice,” says the sister. 

“I won’t have one, I won’t,” the sick woman tries 
to scream out, in a hollow, confused and suffocated 
voice. 

The sister, with the same unvarying, gentle words 
and touch, lays her quietly down, pushes up her 
cap, and raises by little taps on each side of her 
head the tumbled and flattened pillow. 

^Then she resumes her rounds. Here and there 
the sick people watch her curiously, half-raising 
themselves by means of the wooden bars hanging 


10 


AT THE HOSPITAL. 


over their beds, which, long after they have loosed 
their hold, throw a dancing, flitting shadow over 
the top of the bed. 

She stops before a bed of which all the curtains ^ 
are tightly drawn together. The folds fall stiff and 
straight to the ground, the strings of the curtain 
loops droop loose and idly at the corners. Above 
the closely veiled couch the written placard no 
longer hangs on the black metal plate. The sister 
goes up to the bed, draws aside a curtain, and dis- 
appears for a few seconds behind it. Then making 
the sign of the cross, she lets the curtain fall once 
more into its former motionless folds. 

The sister’s step becomes slower as she ap- 
proaches the door of the lying-in ward, from whence 
issue little cries — cries hushed for a moment but 
to break forth stronger and more persistent. The 
sister listens to the cheerfully clamorous song from 
the awakened cradles — a song that to her ears is^^ 
like the joyous twittering of a young brood. After 
the mournful silence, after the plaintive sounds of 
illness, suffering, agony, and death, it seems to her 
that she hears life, living life, calling aloud in the 
cries and wails of these new-born infants. Sud- 
denly she is summoned to a bedside by a shriek of 
pain, followed by sobs, like the sobs of a little / 
child. A light throws a glare within the bed cur- 
tains. A young man stands there, wearing the 
resident students’ skull-cap and a white apron 
fastened to the button of his coat. 


AT THE HO SPIT AH 


11 


By the light of a taper held on high he examines 
a weeping and moaning patient. The sister draws 
near. 

“No, not you,” he says, roughly, taking from her 
hands the bandage she is bringing and passing it 
with the taper to the nurse standing at the other 
'^ide of the bed. And he rapidly moves his hands 
about the patient’s body, renewing the dressing. 

• The sister does not answer the student, but turns 
away and disappears at the further end of the Saint 
Terese ward. 


12 


SISTEB FBILOMENE, 


CHAPTER II. 

SISTER PHILOMENE. 

x'The sister’s name in religion was Sister Philo- 
mene ; on the civil registers it was Marie Gaucher. 

Marie Gaucher was the daughter of a tailoress, 
who, married to a locksmith, earned a couple of shill- 
ings a day by working for the big shops. Marie 
was born in an hour of distress, one January morn- 
ing, under a gay winter’s sun, ushered into the world 
^-between two oaths of the parish midwife, who was 
annoyed at having been called away from a patient 
boarding at her house. 

She began life a tiny thing, not weighing the 
usual weight of a new-born child, without strength 
for life’s struggle, and was fed with the poor milk 
of a mother whose existence was spent in toiling 
late and early at her eternal stitching. The child 
lived all the same, and was four years old when her 
mother died. 

Her father had left them a year before with a 
fellow-workman who was starting for Africa, and 
had not been heard of since. 

The little child was adopted by an aunt, an elder 
sister of her mother, in the service of a widow 
lady, a Madame de Viry, in the Chaussee d’Antin. 


8ISTEB PHILOMENE. 


13 


She had been living there twenty years, had 
closed the eyes of Monsieur de Viry, and assisted 
at the birth of the son of the house, little Henry. 

^--She was one of those old-fashioned servants who 
take root in the family circle. Therefore, when one 
evening as she was helping her mistress to undress, 
she spoke of her neice, Madame de Viry did not 
■ even give her time to utter a request, and the very 
day of the mother’s funeral the child was brought 
home to the Rue Chaussee d’ An tin. She looked 
upon the apartment, new as it was to her, without 
any surprise ; showed no curiosity at the sight of 
the furniture, carpets, mahogany cabinets, nor at 
the clock with its classical bronze figures, and the 
family portraits in their gilt frames. In a very 
short time the comforts of this home caused the 
sickly bud to expand and blossom. ^ Her character, 
at first unsociable and shy, soon toned down ; her 
prattle and laugh became less constrained, her 
manners more natural and fearless ; the ill-grown 
puny child began to thrill with the active bright- 
ness of a bird.' Madame de Viry, who had accepted 
her widowhood as an austere duty and had retired 
from society in order to devote herself more entirely 
to her son, enjoyed the presence of the child, whose 
romps, and noise, and bright blue eyes filled and 
warmed her saddened and solitary life. Then, 
again, Madame de Viry had lost a little girl of the 
same age, and mothers love to caress even the 
shadow of their child. -y" 


14 


SISTEB F HILO MENS. 


little girl became over-excited by the indul- 
gence shown to her. Tolerated in the drawing- 
room like a pet lap-dog, she soon thought it her 
proper place, and joined in little Henry’s games on 
the footing of equality natural to children. The 
familiarity with which the child was treated and 
her pretty, dainty manners, flattered her aunt’s 
vanity, and she felt a secret pride at her being kept 
out of the kitchen and playing the lady^ Marie’s 
little audacities and encroaching ways, her childish 
conceit that increased by constant association with 
her superior, her nascent coquetry that had already 
reveled in the faded ribbons and discarded frocks 
bestowed on her by Madame de Viry — all this de- 
lighted the old woman, who, with the vulgar affec- 
tion of a woman of the people, loved to surround 
the little thing with a respectful tenderness, as 
though the child were of a different class from her 
own, destined to a higher sphere. ") Marie was at the 
age when social barriers seem not to exist, and she 
was full of illusions ; she put on airs with her aunt’s 
friends and the servants of the house, and showed 
a kind of severe reserve toward the neighboring 
coal-merchant’s children who invited her to play 
in the street. 'On one occasion she had been al- 
lowed to dine with Henry in honor of his having 
gained a prize at school, and in consequence she re- 
fused the following day to eat with her aunt in the 
kitchen. On another occasion, not being permitted 
to join a childrens’ party, given every Shrove 


SISTJER PHILOMENE. 


15 


Tuesday by Madame de Viry, she remained all day 
long sulkily seated on a chair in the anteroom, 
hiding and struggling to suppress her tears. She 
was wounded by a thousand trifles which she 
failed to understand, and yet suffered from; the 
slightest neglect, words heedlessly uttered by 
Madame de Viry, idle observations betraying social 
differences, all that she instinctively felt placed her 
in the position of an inferior in the household, bit- 
terly humiliated her. At the end of two years 
Madame de Viry noticed the evil, saw the irrita- 
tion of the child, and thought it necessary to change 
her life and surroundings. Her aunt yielded to 
Madame de Viry’s arguments, though with a heavy 
heart, hardly understanding her reasons, and the 
mistress and maid settled that on the following 
Monday the little one should enter the orphanage 

kept by the Sisters of Saint , situated at the top 

of the Faubourg Saint Denis. 

The day of her departure there was a terrible 
scene. The child piteously sobbed and clung to the 
furniture and to Madame de Viry’s skirts. She 
resisted and struggled with all her might even in 
her aunt’s arms, who was at last obliged to carry 
her bodily off. Once she had entered the convent 
gate all the violence of her despair vanished, and 
her grief became like that of a grown-up person- 
silent and frigid. When the sisters took off her 
embroidered cap and silk frock made out of her 
mother’s wedding-dress that her aunt had had 


16 


SISTER FHILOMENE. 


dyed, and replaced them by a formal little plaited 
linen cap and a plain green merino frock, she was 
seized with a fit of trembling, but her eyes re- 
mained dry. However, when she went to bed she 
broke down, and midnight was long past before she 
fell asleep. The black vail of her closed but sleep- 
less eyelids seemed flecked with visions of the past, 
fleeting and fugitive as the fiery sparks that start 
and flit across a burning paper. ^There passed be- 
fore her in a transient gleam the corner of the 
drawing-room in which she used to put her doll, 
and against a dark background past memories rose 
up and met her gaze. At one moment the large 
wine-basket in which her aunt laid her before carry- 
ing her up-stairs to bed, stood before her, almost 
within touch, and the sheet of her crib assumed the 
shape of the dinner napkins on which she slept in 
that basket; or again she recalled the mornng 
romps, when returning with her aunt from market- 
ing, she had jumped like a big dog on Monsieur 
Henry’s bed, putting her little icy-cold hands 
round his neck, till the sleepy fellow, half -angrily, 
half-laughingly, opened one eye, and pushed her 
off onto the carpet. 

The next day, as there was already a little girl 
called Marie in the convent, and two of the same 
name might cause confusion, she was informed 
that in future she would be called Philomene. 

This was indeed a desperate blow for the child ; 
she had been less hurt even by being deprived of 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


17 


the frock she had come in. ^ut now it seemed to 
her that she was being stripped of all her past life, 
wrenched away from the happy days she had spent 
at Madame de Viry’s. She hated the name of 
Philomene, which was for her the convent baptism, 
the beginning of a life she loathed and dreaded, and 
for a long time she refused to answer to her new 
name.'l 

, At first the sisters petted and strove to amuse 

her, but she opposed a sullen resistance, a stolid 
passivity and dull despair to all their coaxing and 
kindly attentions. The high, bare walls of the 
quiet house, full of peace, but also full of silence, 
seemed but dead to her, and here in the midst of 
the sisters, who appeared to her stern and ter- 
rible even in their gentleness, she drew morbidly 

. within herself. The atmosphere she breathed fell 
cold and chill upon her heart, and she gathered to 
herself all her tender feelings as though to cheer 
and warm herself. She thought of her aunt’s kisses, 
which were not like the kisses of the sisters, in 
which she instinctively felt a conventional compas- 
sion that failed to satisfy her cravings. (For the 
first time in her life she realized how cold a caress 
may be."^ 

However, little by little the child’s grief calmed 
down. Habit and ennui softened her regrets, lulled 
her by the monotonous hours, the discipline and 
unchangeable routine, the sameness of each suc- 
ceeding day, in a life totally devoid of incidents. 




18 


SIJiTHR PEILOMENE. 


and ever the same from morning till night ; getting 
up at five, cleaning the house, all the little ones tak- 
ing their share, some sweeping, some making the 
beds, while others dragged the rugs into the yard 
and shook the dust of them into each other’s faces. 
Then, at nine, soup, and lessons till twelve — read- 
ing, writing, sacred history, and the four rules of 
arithmetic ; at twelve, a dinner composed of soup 
and the meat from it, which they nicknamed col- 
let ; at one o’clock a bell that summoned them back 
from the play-ground to the work-room, where the 
needlework that helped to maintain the establish- 
ment was carried on, the youngest hemming 
kitchen cloths and the more skillful girls making 
button-holes ; at three, a slice of bread and a short 
recreation that broke the stitching, which was then 
resumed till seven o’clcok; after that they had a 
supper of vegetables and played till bed-time at 
nine. 

^Philomene now no longer cried ; she forgot her 
plans for running away, and was indeed changed as 
though she had passed through some severe illness. 
She who had formerly been so lively, so turbulent, 
and so expansive, had now lost all the sprightliness 
and vivacity of her character. During the recrea- 
tions the sisters had almost to force her to play. 
She became singularly quiet, slow even ; her voice 
drawling, her accent whining. f*Bhe had the sub- 
dued, sad, depressed attitudes and gestures of a 
half-starved, shivering child. ] They were not dis- 


SISTEK PHILOMENE. 


19 


satisfied with her at the convent ; she worked 
steadily, but without zeal. The sisters only found 
fault with her for being a little lazy. 

The passive life of the convent had, however, 
only outwardly affected the child’s ardent nature. 
The quieter her body, the more restless her brain. 
^_^The whole week before the first Sunday of each 
month, the day her aunt came to see her, she was 
in a state of fever. When on that day the little 
girl was sent for to the parlor, she reached it so 
trembling and pale with emotion that two or three 
times her aunt had feared lest she should faint. 
Then all she had to relate since her aunt’s previous 
visit hurried to her lips, strangling and choking 
her utterance ; she would begin phrases and sud- 
denly stop short, gazing anxiously up into her 
aunt’s face. And clinging to the old woman, who 
laughed but felt more inclined to cry, half -seated 
on her aunt’s chair, throwing her arms round her 
neck, she coaxed and forced her to put her cheek 
against her own, and thus raising her eyes and 
looking into her aunt’s face at each question, she 
asked about the concierge of the house, the butter- 
woman of tlie street, Madame de Viry, and Mon- 
sieur Henry, inquiring if she was forgotten, if they 
still spoke of her, if Monsieur Henry remembered her 
and when it would be his birthday that slie might 
write to him. \ At one o’clock they parted. But 
the parlor door was hardly closed and the little one 
alone, when she would again half-open the door, 


20 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


and putting her head in, with a sad and roguish 
smile she would wave a last kiss to her aunt. 



by chance her aunt missed the twelve o’clock 
visit, from twelve to one the child felt as each ^one 
of her companions was summoned a painful shock, 
a blow at her heart, and she continued uneasy and 
restless the whole time of vespers. On the bench 
where she sat side by side with her playmates, one 
of a long row of small white, motionless caps, her 
head was to be seen in constant agitation, turning 
and twisting round, displaying her anxious little 
countenance and eager, searching gaze, till at last 
she would catch sight of the blue ribbons in her 


SISTER PIIILOMENR 


21 


aunt’s cap amid the throng of other caps. On quit- 
ting the church, the old woman would wait for her 
and return with her from the church door to the 
convent gates, the child insisting on her walking 
in the ranks and leaning on her arm in the street 
— The Church loves to surround childhood with 
pretty and fresh faces. She knows how these lit- 
tle beings, in whom the soul is called to life through 
the senses, are impressed by the outward appear- 
ance of those around them ; she therefore strives 
to appeal to their eyes, to attract them by the 
charm of the women who teach and tend them. 
The Church chooses for these duties the sisters 
whose countenances are most pleasing and cheer- 
ful, for it seems as though she wished, by the smil- 
ing faces of the younger sisters, to replace the ab- 
sent mothers’ smile for the poor little orphans. 

^Of the ten sisters who had charge of these 
orphans, nearly all were young, nearly all pretty ; 
those even who had not regular features had a 
gentle glance, a sweet smile that made them sym- 
pathetic and charming. One only formed an excep- 
tion, and she, poor thing, was utterly devoid of 
grace. 

^ This sister was slightly humpbacked, one shoulder 
being higher than the other, spoke with a strong 
provincial accent that made her thoroughly ridicu- 
lous, and moreover, had a face like a mask. 

It was impossible to see or hear her without re- 
calling Punch to mind. The children had nick- 


22 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


named her Sister Carabosse. With the gestures of 
a man, she crossed her legs, stuck her arms akimbo 
in speaking, and stood with her hands behind her 
back. Her manners, too, were abrupt and rough, 
and at first sight her thick, black eyebrows inspired 
fear. Notwithstanding appearances, however. Sis- 
ter Marguerite was the best of creatures^ The 
small allowance her family — small land-owners in 
Perigord — gave her was entirely spent on cakes 
for the children when taken out walking. Seeing 
this little girl remain surly and lonely among com- 
panions of her own age, not joining even in theii>- 
games, the kind sister comprehended that there ex- 
isted some wounded feeling, some need for consola- 
tion in the child whom the other sisters, rebuffed in 
their first advances, now abandoned to her isolation, 
Instinctively she attached herself to Philomene, 
occupied herself with her during playtime, bought 
her a skipping-rope, and lightened her sewing task . 
— in short, Philomene became her favorite, her 
adopted protegee. <^One day after lunch, without 
any apparent cause, Philomene threw herself into 
the sister’s arms and burst into tears, finding 
no other way of thanking her. The sister did not 
know what to say, for she also began to cry, with- 
out knowing why, when suddenly the child broke 
into a laugh, and her moist eyes brightened. As 
she raised her head she had just caught sight of the 
ridiculous appearance that Sister Carabosse pre- 
sented with tears streaming down her cheeks^. 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


23 


— From that moment Philomene became like her 
little companions ; a slightly serious look only re- 
mained on her otherwise open aud frank counte- 
nance. She took pleasure in the amusements of 
her age, recovered the spirit, appetite, tastes, and 
boisterous health of youth, and eagerly joined in 
all the games. A spirit of emulation took posses- 
sion of her, and she became interested in her work. 
She often thought of the large silver heart of the 
Virgin hanging in the oratory with the names of 
the girls who had behaved best during the week 
pinned up around it ; and she envied all the badges 
distributed for assiduity in the work-room — the 
green ribbon and silver medal of the infant Jesus, 
the red ribbon of St. Louis of Gonzague, or the 
white ribbon of the Holy Angels. 



/^Each week now brought its amusement, the 


24 


SISTER PHILOMENK 


Thursday’s walks, now an intense pleasure, which 
in the early days had seemed so dull and mournful. 

The sisters nearly always took the little flock 
along the banks of the Canal Saint Martin. The 
children walked two by two, scattering as they 
passed along, in the murmur of their voices a sound 
^y-like that of humming bees, watching a boy Ashing, 
or a dog running up and down a barge, or a wheel- 
barrow trundled over a bending plank ; happy at 
the mere sight, and happy to breathe in and to lis- 
ten to the echoes of Paris. 

At the Feast of the Assumption, on the Mother 
Superior’s fete day, and two or three other times a 
year, they went into the country, and were usually 
taken to Saint Cloudr^ They went through the park, 
crossed the bridge at Sevres, wandered by the river- 
side, under the trees, till they reached a small inn 
at Suresnes. There in the arbors they crowded 
round the wooden tables, all stained with purple 
wine, and feasted upon a large cream cheese, bought 
by Sister Marguerite.-^' 

, — These joyous, free, open-air treats, the romps in 
the tall grass, the wild flowers gathered under the 
willow trees — all this impressed the excursion m re 
lastingly on Philomene even than the others. She 
awoke on the ensuing mornings filled with these 
recollections, and when the sight of the clouds, 
roads and river had grown dim in her memory, she 
still retained of the country she no longer beheld a 
perfume, an echo, a sensation of sun ; and the scent 


SISTER FHILOMENK 


25 


of the trees, the rippling of the water came gently 
back to her as from afar. 

One day more especially dwelt in her mind. They 
had, as they returned from the country, entered the 
grounds of a market-gardener, (it was May.) The 
luminous sky had an infinite though subdued trans- 
parency, like a white sky overspread with a softly 
shimmering vail of blue net. (The atmosphere was 
sweet with the morning’s breath. At moments a 
breeze gently shivered through the trees, and died 
^away like a caress on the children’s cheeks. In 
the tenderness of both sky and air, the pear, peach, 
cherry, and apricot trees blazed forth in a glory of 
blossom, silvery clusters nestling on every boughc — >- 
\Qnder the apple trees a vast nosegay lay scattered 
over the red-brown earth, and the sun dancing 
through the foliage flitted like a bird over the 
snowy carpet of flowersT) The radiant impression 
left by this vision of a soft and delicious Nature, 
decked as for a virginal feast, the dazzling orchard 
caught sight of in its tender springtide of candor 
and freshness — all this lived like a dream in the 
heart of little Philomene^) 

Little by little the singular persistency of her 
sensations, the unconscious faculty for retaining a 
vision, as it were, for things gone by, made the 
child more impressionable, and developed in her an 
acute taste of sensitiveness. She grew melancholy, 
and was almost angered at any caress bestowed by 
the sisters on the other little girls ; a word or a 


26 


SISTm PHILOMENE. 


question addressed to another wounded her as a 
slight or neglect. She had such a craving for ten- 
derness and affection that any kindness displayed 
to others seemed something robbed from her ; and 
this dread of which she was herself ashamed ; this 
torture which she hid, was betrayed by an unreason- 
ing jealousy One day the whole convent went to 
spend the afternoon at Madame de Mareuil’s, near 
Lagny. Madame de Mareuil was the benefactress 
of the convent, and every year gave a great lunch 
to the little orphans. CAt the end of the day, while 
the carriages were conveying them home, the little 
ones having had a sip of champagne, all talked at 
the same time, recalling out loud, as if it were a 
fairy tale, the wonderful things they had seen — the 
moat full of water, the great gilded gates, the 
avenues with festoons of ivy, clinging in garlands 
from tree to tree, and the satin-covered chairs, 
and the great gallery where the family portraits 
gazed down on them as they ate, and the boundless 
park, the marble statues, and the hot-house flowers 
they did not even know the names of, that looked 
like wax.' Philomene, in the midst of the noise, 
admiration, and exclamations, alone remained un- 
moved and silent. 

.'-^Well, you little dumb thing,” said Sister Mar- 
guerite, ‘'you do not say anythiug. Was it not all 
fine enough to please you? What do you mean by 
being so quiet? Come, come, I know; you would 
have liked to have been with the big girls, and the 


8ISTEB PHILO MENS. 


27 


lady to notice you. I know what you are, you 

like ” And the sister, stopping short, heaved a 

compassionate sigh as she looked at the child. That 
night, before Philomene dropped off to sleep, she 
felt Sister Marguerite gently pulled her blanket up 
over her hands and her uncovered shoulders. 

All the kindly sister’s care and attention could 
not, however, wrest the child’s heart from the 
memory of the Rue de la Chaussee d’Antin. Her 
thoughts continually turned toward her aunt, 
toward Madame de Viry and Monsieur Henry;/ As 
in the past, the first Sundays in the month were the 
most eventful days in her life. If she trembled 
less when called to the parlor, she still had the 
same tender caress for her aunt, and exacted always 
the same promise from the old woman^ — that when 
she would be old enough she should return to 
Madame de Viry’s — with a query of “That is cer- 
tain, is it not?” full of an anxiety that rose from 
the very depths of her being.^^ 

Besides these Sundays three weeks in the year 
also caused Philomene the deepest emotion. These 
were the eight days preceding New Year’s Day, 
the eight days preceding Madame de Viry’s fete 
day, and the eight days before that of her aunt. 
All that time she lived a double kind of existence, 
pondering over the letter of good wishes she longed 
to make so fine. ' Long in advance she had bought 
some pretty writing-paper with initials surrounded 
by a wreath of embossed roses ; with what embar- 


28 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


rassment and diffidence did she strive to set forth 
well-rounded phrases, similar to those she read in 
books! What care she took in writing to close 
the a’s well, to make no blots. Once her letter 
ended, signed, and sealed with a transparent wafer, 
what machinations for it to arrive just on the eve 
of the fete day. 

Philomene was ten years old when a little girl 
two years older than herself entered the orphanage. 

On seeing each other for the first time, the two 
children went toward one another with the impulse 
and natural instinct of children that have already 
met. This spontaneous affection was cemented the 
following day at play-time by a present the new- 
comer, Celine, made to Philomene. For many a 
day this present seemed to Philomene the most 
lovely thing in the world. It was an embossed and 
stamped envelope imitating net, and on it was dis- 
played a vase whereon was written in gilt letters 
surrounded by gold flourishes, the word. Souvenir ; 
from this envelope could be drawn forth a nosegay 
of painted cut-out lilac that opened like a fan with 
seven sticks, on each of which a little printed 
medallion displayed the infant Jesus lying in the~v 
manger, surrounded by kneeling children. Philo- 
mene had carefully shut up and hid this beautiful 
gift in her mass-book ; the first days she constantly 
gazed at it, touched it, unfolded it, looking at the 
pictures and reading the litany printed round them 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


29 


— ‘^Oh, Jesus! divine Savior, as my New Year’s 
gift accept my heart. 

->The two little ones soon became intimate friends, 
and whenever they could be together were never 
apart. They shared everything that their friends 
brought them, even their butter and sugar. Their 
thoughts, joys, disappointments were one. In the 
playground they were always seen together, some- 
times with an arm thrown round the neck or 
slipped round the waist of the other, absorbed the 
while in ceaseless conversation ; and they walked 
to and fro in the yard linked together in some 
pretty child-like gesture, confidentially leaning 
on one another ;(^Philomene with large eyes, long 
lashes, slow glance, and full, half -par ted lips, rosy 
and rather tanned cheeks, and amber-colored locks 
straying from under her cap; Celine with rounded, 
prominent forehead, naturally curly hair, small, 
clear, deep-set gray eyes, open nostrils, thin lips, 
dimpled chin, and oval face.'"^ After a few turns, 
they would often sit down on the stone bench near 
the pump ; even in winter they sat there for a 
quarter of an hour at a time, huddled up in print 
gowns that through the poor thin folds betrayed a 
thick woollen knitted vest, the tips of their shape- 
less listshoes resting on the ground ; and they re- 
mained there, overcome with cold, silent and 
motionless, taking an indolent pleasure in the numb- 
ing sensation, while they gazed into space, Philo- 


30 


SISTER PhlLOMENE. 


mene looking at some bird, Celine watching a pass- 
ing cloud. 

Until her entry into the convent, Celine had been 
the little nurse and maid of cin infirm grandmother. 
Her childhood had been lulled and charmed by the 
“Lives of the Saints.” The old woman read a few 
pages out loud every evening, opening the book 
with her gouty fingers at the page she had marked 
the previous day. Then as she grew older, Celine 
in her turn took the big book on her lap, and read 
to her grandmother. She had learned to read in 
that book ; in it her imagination had spelt out its 
first letters, and this her first alphabet was the initia- 
tion of her life. 

The miracles, adventures, self-sacrifices, heroisms, 
glorious agonies, divine deaths, half-revealed 
heavens, showers of palms, had dazzled her like a 
fairy tale of miracles. The legends of the Legende 
doree filled her brain and seemed to swell her fore- 
head — a forehead resembling that of Memling’s 
little Virgin — almost deformed by the bump of the 
marvelous. A magic world stood out of these 
pages, as thrilling as that by which a nurse 
awakens the first dream and stimulates the reason- 
ing of a child. She found in the history of these 
saints and martyrs, so full of phantoms, monsters, 
and metamorphoses, the raptures, the enthralment, 
the emotions, the sweet horror of phantasmagoria, 
and the ideal reality that fairy tales convey to a 
being of her age j and as by the side of the old 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


31 


woman nothing came to disturb the illusions of the 
child, as neither doubt nor smile ever startled the 
naive warmth of her impressions, or her first trust 
and faith, for her the path strewn with Hop-o’-my- 
Thumb’s crumbs was represented by the desert road 
planted by Saint Macaire with a willow-tree at 
every mile ; the talking bird of India tales was the 
grasshopper that roused Saint Gregory from sleep ; 
and the water that sang was the block of ice im- 
ploring Saint Theobald to say masses for the soul 
shut up within it. She did not behold visions of 
palaces with diamond gates, conjured up by the 
wave of a wand, in which Golden Locks had been 
slumbering for some hundred years, (but she 
dreamed of the golden ladders touching the ground, 
of the pathway magnificently carpeted and daz- 
zling with light, that led a saint’s soul from a cell 
to celestial glory Even her terrors in the dark 
were not the usual terrors of a child ; she did not 
fancy she saw an ogre nor a bogey nor thieves ; 
but outlined in the obscurity, as by a coal of fire, 
drawing quite close to her in her sleeplessness, was 
the devil, such as she had seen him in the legend, 
tempting a saint. ] 

— In the day-time, the land of saints unrolled itself 
before her in a radiant and confused perspective. 
She repeated words that in her ears sounded like 
the noise of a shell from the Eastern waters, and 
the name of a certain King Gondoforus brought to 
her the sonorous echo of a far-off kingdom. Then 


32 


SISTER FHILOMENE. 


the vaults of heaven seemed to open and angelic 
voices silenced the voice of man. “You don’t talk 
to-day?” the grandmother would sometimes say to 
her while the little girl mechanically plied her needle 
— hemming a towel or darning a stocking. The child 
merely answered by a smile ; she was dreaming of 
solitudes, deserts, a hermitage in a corner of the 
Monceaux plain, just beyond Paris, in a spot she 
had seen. 

Lifting her above the realities of life, these 
thoughts and dreams made Celine’s life happy ; but 
soon a mere passive and ideal communion with this 
miraculous history did not suffice for her; the long 
martyrology, ever ready with sacrifices and obla- 
tions to God, incited her to self-immolation. She 
strove to martyrize herself, silently, as best she 
could. She chastised her innocent little senses, de- 
prived herself of her favorite dishes, imposed on 
herself the recital of a certain number of Aves as 
she walked down a street. She took vows of silence 
for half a day. When she went to bed, heavy with 
sleep, she would force herself to remain awake 
several hours till a time she had previously fixed on ; 
or when her grandmother offered her an excursion 
or a treat, she punished herself by refusing, saying 
she was ill and going to bed. 
p^Church-going, confession, and her first com- 
munion had developed this mystic temperament. 
Celine had subtilized all these little self-sacrifices, 
and by dint of sharpening and reiterating her petty 


. 8I8TEE PHILOMENE. 


33 


torments, by the ingenuity and detail she exerted, 
had carried them to the verge of cruelty. She 
took a certain pride in putting to the test her sickly 
and childish little body, already eager and strong 
for suffering. The stories of young Christian girls 
brought before the proconsul, from whose wounded 
limbs when torn by iron rakes, milk flowed instead 
of blood, had always been an attraction and a 
temptation for her. 

' Philomene, more delicate, more sensitive, less 
dreamy and more tender, was constantly censured 
and lectured by Celine. Celine, with a zeal of 
proselytism that already kindled and purified her 
friendships and affections, had taken to heart the 
task of strengthening and guiding a soul that she 
considered feeble and idle. By persuasion and 
advice, by the influence of earnest words and ex- 
ample, little by little she lifted her companion out 
of the weaknesses and natural disposition of her 
age. She inveigled her into a course of little sacri- 
fices, not, however, without struggles and much 
patience. She had to gain ground inch by inch, be 
ready each day to go over all again, make unceas- 
ing efforts of reasoning, use irony without bitter- 
ness, anxious prayers and supplications against 
Philomene’s pleadings, her timid opposition, re- 
sistance and excuses for her lukewarmness. 

^ Often Philomene would complain, say she was 
not strong enough, that so much must not be de- 
manded of her. Celine was never at a loss for an 


31 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


answer. Se was always ready to quote an exa. pie, 
the virtue of some saint or another to which they 
must aspire. And she replied to the murmuring 
of her soul as she had replied to those of her body 
the day that Philomene expressed disgust at the 
boiled beef given them for every dinner : 

“Ah, my dear, remember Saint Angele — three 
walnuts, three chestnuts, three tigs, and three 
leeks, that was all she ate, and bread only on Sun- 
day ; and you dare to grumble !” 

A nature like Philomene’s was easily influenced, 
and ready to submit ; she expanded under the in- 
spiration Celine strove to kindle and rouse within 
her. When, during the recreations, the giddy little 
ones of the convent came and sang round them : 

I love wine, 

I love onion, 

I love Suzon, 

Celine and she replied : 

I love the convent, 

Love the convent, 

Love the convent. 

Her friend’s faith was hers also, but her charac- 
ter lent it her own form and expression. What in 
Celine was a hidden and concentrated Are was with 
her an overflowing flame; her exaltation became 
an expansion. 

'^^he sisters were surprised and delighted at this 
change. They saw a special grace in this sudden 
conversion of a child who till then had shown but 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


35 


fi careless and indifferent piety, and whom they 
now quoted to the other little girls as a model o^ 
'fervent faith, regularity, and punctuality. 

^ Every day on awakening Philomene crossed her- 
self and offered up her first thoughts to God. 
While dressing she prayed for the robe of innocence 
lost by original sin. Before beginning her work 
she laid it all at the Lord’s feet in expiation of her 
errors. She never forgot to murmur a short prayer 
at the strike of the hour. At nine o’clock she 
thought as she prayed of the Holy Ghost, who at 
that hour had on Whit-Sunday descended on the 
apostles ; at twelve she invoked the Angel Gabriel. 
Before dinner she went through a short examina- 
tion of her faults while reciting a Miserere. Before 
play-time she asked God to guard her speech. At 
the hour when Jesus gave up the ghost, she be- 
sought him to attach her to his cross so that she 
could never leave it. Then followed other short 
prayers — prayers to remember the presence of God, 
prayers whenever she had committed any trifling 
fault. In the evening, before getting into bed, she 
never failed to pray and kiss the floor three times. 
If she awoke at night, she joined in thought those 
servants of God who sing his praises during the 
night hours ; she joined in the worship of the blessed 
saints, the songs of the angelic host in Paradise, 
and then endeavored to go to sleep ag ain in an at- 
titude becoming in God’s sight, such as she would 
wish for if death came and surprised her. 


36 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


/^The time for Philomene’s first communion drew 
near while she was >etin the fervor aroused by 
her friend’s infiuence. It was a great event in 
her childish existence. Thoroughly prepared by 
the weekly catechism class, she was filled and 
agitated by emotion. The week preceding the 
great and momentous Sunday, a retreat consisting 
of a course of exercises, instructions, and exhorta- 
tions stimulated her zeal and ardor. This with- 
drawal from life and external thought, the medita- 
tion and fascination of the long vigils, the con- 
stantly evoked images of the fiesh and blood of 
Christ, the mysterious joy of a union with God, 
threw Philomene into a kind of mystical rapture.^^ 
Abstinence, fasting, the natural feebleness of a 
body ill-nourished by the meagre convent fare, all 
contributed to deaden her faculties and increase 
her ecstatic condition. Under the spiritual exag- 
geration and nervous irritation of constant prayer 
she was alternately thrown into transports of adora- 
tion or crushed and bowed down by contrition. 
All her blood seemed to rush to her head and heart. 
She was shaken all over by inward agitation, by 
the passionate longing of her childish imaginaion 
thirsting for love. She would quit the confessional 
bathed in tears, happy to feel them streaming down 
her cheeks till they reached and moistened her 
lips. It was a passionate aspiration toward all that 
the first approach to the mystery of the sacrament 
can bring to an excitable child of twelve — new 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


37 


sensations, inner revelations, unknown ardors. 
She fancied she had a call; a new conscience 
seemed to awake within her ; she felt as if she had 
dismissed one part of her life, and abruptly entered 
upon another; as though the veil of her childish 
soul were torn asunder in a first assumption of wo- 
manly character and moral responsibility. 

last the great day came. Philomene had beg- 
ged her aunt to bring her some eau-de-cologne and 
some scented pomatum. When she entered the 
church in the midst of the other communicants, 
she stood as if transfixed ; she could neither hear 
nor see anything around her, and was so moved 
that she hardly knew what she was doing. There 
seemed to be a great hum and roar in her and 
around her ; the fragrance of the cosmetics she had 
used enveloped her, and she inhaled them as a 
breath of Paradise, not realizing that they eman- 
ated from her own person. Rays of light streamed 
t.hrough the church, throwing the jewel-like color 
of the stained-glass windows over the altar. A 
bluish vapor rose in the dusty daylight. The 
lighted tapers threw their sparkle upon the white 
frocks. In the n^ve voices mingled with perfumes, 
and prayers with hymns. The censers swung back 
with a broken sound in the white-gloved hands. 
But for Philomene there was nothing but the altar, 
and on the altar nothing but the tabernacle. She 
gazed steadfastly at it, and by a wonderful effort 
riveted her inner sight as well, forcing both mind 


38 


SISTER PHILOMENR 


and vision to pierce through the mist which after 
long gazing shrouds all things from our view, till 
she fancied she fathomed the mysterious depths of 
the gilded shrine, as the sun is divined behind the 
hill that hides it by the faint light it leaves above. 

As the girls on the bench arose she rose, too. Her 
turn came, and she received the Host. As she par- 
took of it, she felt an ineffable sensation of faint- 
ness, a rapture that was almost a swoon. 



- - From this day the church became for Philomene 
a calm, holy spot, tender and familiar, like some 
well-remembered room of childhood’s home, full of 
tender memories of a mothers’ love. 

She waited impatiently for ^unday, when she 
would go there, live there a whole day, lingering 
on from service to service. 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


39 


^Nevertheless, Saint Laurent, where the sisters 
took the children, was but a shabby little church. 
Situated at the top of thf Boulevard de Strasbourg, 
and now standing clear from its surroundings, it 
looked like an old country church, abandoned in the 
middle of a lonely square, in which maybe some 
rope-maker carried on his trade. 

^Inside it was cold and bare; one felt it to be the 
poverty-stricken parish church of the two fau- 
bourgs, the Faubourg Saint Denis and the Fau- 
' bourg Saint Martin. Not a sound was to be heard 
under the severely arched roof, along the gray and 
dirty walls ; at times only the dragging step of 
slipshod clogs over the pavement, or a harsh and 
hollow cough broke the silence. The congregatioi^ 
was of the poorest class ; a second-hand dealer in 
clothes with a colored handkerchief on her head, 
a maid carrying home some small, family dinner 
tied up in a cloth, a coal-woman who hissed be- 
tween her lips a silent prayer, a mother with a 
basket, and a child in her arms over whom she 
makes the sign of the cross as she enters, or a 
seamstress praying with bent head, and finger-tips 
roughened by the needle raised to her mouth. 
^.Women in mourning, with old black dresses, bon- 
/ nets, and vails turned rusty, pass through the 
aisles. Close by the iron railings of the side 
chapels other old women in linen caps may be seen, 
with fixed gaze, dilated pupils, and eyes upraised, 
mumbling prayers. At times, also, in a corner some 


40 


SISTEB PHILO MENS. 


bent old man in a shabby blue coat whitened at the 
seams, would kneel humbly on the ground. Philo- 
mene, however, did not notice the melancholy 
aspect of Saint Laurent. {She did not see that the 
church was miserable, for she was happy there, and 
it seemed to her that her pleasure was due to the 
place itself and its belongings*^^ She was conscious 
of a vague sensation of comfort and infinite peace, 
a dreamy idleness and languid satisfaction. The 
spell she was under while seated in the nave gave 
her the sensation of a balmy and soothing climate, 
and the penetrating, subtle atmosphere of the 
phurch seeemed to her that of an ideal fatherland. 

— She was awed on entering by the cold touch of 
f the holy water, she enjoyed the smell of the lighted 
tapers and dying incense, and the fading perfume 
of burnt balm and wax that pervaded the whole 
church. She delighted in the peaceful calm, 
broken only now and again by a soft step, the 
rustle of a dress, the leaves of a book turned over, 
the murmur of praying lips. The organ lulled her„^ 
with a harmony and melody that rocked and 
soothed her, and she abandoned herself to the burst 
of sound, to the tempest of noise that swept over 
her, to the celestial chorus that throbbed in her 
temples and re-echoed in her heart. She listened in,,.^^ 
unconscious rapture to the chant of the priests and 
choristers, which from the depths of the chapels was 
responded to from afar by voices young and old. 

And at vespers, she was deliciously stirred by one 


8ISTEE PHILOMENE. 


41 


of the voices in the choir, a high, thin head voice, 
tender and penetrating, which seemed to send up 
on high an echo of the Passion. 

^-^The voices, music, atmosphere, and perfume of 
the churcli always affected her more and more 
sweetly as the day wore on. Her thoughts floated 
more dreamily in the waning light that sent from 
the windows a snowy reflection on the confessionals 
and confusedly mingled its fading whiteness with 
the rose-colored light of the tapers and lamps. She 
sat there, almost sleeping, indulging with a secret 
delight in the dreams and illusions created by the 
uncertain light, letting her gaze wander before 
her over the already dusky chapels, the shadowy 
nooks and corners round the choir, where the 
whiteness of a cap, a colorless complexion, the 
blackness of a shawl or dress, the white edge of a 
petticoat vaguely outlined some feminine shadows 
seated on a bench.'\ And when at the end of the 
last service the shuffling of the chairs drew her 
from this torpor, she was roused from it like a 
person abruptly startled out of a dream. Soon the 
church was to become more precious still to her. 
Behind the door, at the apse of Saint Laurent, 
is a chapel toward which all the poor direct their 
step as they enter. 

front of it, in the somber recess of an angle 
of the wall, stand four rows of little thin tapers 
stuck on tall prongs fastened into a wooden 
pedestal, flickering with the fitful and uncertain 


42 


SISTER PHILOMENR 


light of tallow, and throwing a vacillating glimmer 
into the surrounding gloom. By their faint gleam 
can just be discerned a dark shadow huddled up 
against the wooden base, a crushed, abandoned 
body, bent double like a Christ taken down from the 
cross, a creature muffled up in a hooded cloak, out 
of which a hand only is stretched to receive the 
penny for each taper. The chapel opens at the 
side*, and on a white and gold altar, covered with 
lace over faded blue silk, in the midst of tiers of 
artificial flowers under glass shades, a white Vir- 
gin, bearing on her bosom seven flaming gold 
hearts hanging to a white watered ribbon — “ Our 
Lady of Sorrow” — stands out from a background 
of azure and golden rays emanating from a triangle. 

Pretty, smiling, and gentle, like any young queen, 
she gracefully upholds on a globe an infant Jesus, 
who bedecked with rosaries and medals, seems 
only intent on playing with Saint John. Above 
the altar, on a carved frontal, painted green to 
imitate marble, is written up in great blue letters, 
“Confraternity of the Blessed and Immaculate 
Mothei* of God, Our Lady of the Sick. Privileged 
Altar. ” 

Madame de Viry had fallen ill with a malady 
that was to end fatally after a long year of suffer- 
ing, and Philomene obtained permission from the 
sisters to go and pray every Sunday in this chapel 
“dedicated to the sick.” She remained near the 
entry by the side of the wall covered with white 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


43 


marble tablets^ on which were inscribed in golden 
letters the following outbursts of gratitude, “To 
Mary, 20th April, 18 — , I called upon Mary and she 
heard my prayer.” “Oh, Mary! oh, my mother!” 
8he would remain on her knees there for more than 
an hour at a time, and amid all the women — 
mother, daughters, wives, and sisters of sick per- 
sons — praying to the Virgin as to a last hope, she 
could be recognized by the fervor of her attitude,^ 
by her down-bent head and uplifted shoulders, 
raised as she rested her elbows on the back of a 
chair ; by the straight lines of her skirt falling to 
the ground in stiff, angular folds, broken only by 
her heels. 

Philomene’s health had somewhat suffered of 
late. Her animated complexion, bright like that 
of a child fresh from play, was fading away, and 
her lips, no longer red, had assumed a violet tinge. 

She was getting pallid, and her hands grew 
whiter and thinner. 

She was overcome by a general feeling of dis- 
comfort ; aches and pains seemed every day to af- 
fect a different part of her body, leaving an intense 
weariness of both mind and body. She rose from 
her bed with fatigue, and going up stairs or run- 
ning made her heart beat so violently that she had 
constantly to rest. The least work required an 
, ...y . effort, a battle with self. Involuntarily she let her- 
self sink into a drowsiness that numbed her 
[5^4 thoughts and feelings. She vaguely thought of 


44 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


death, talked to her aunt of Madame de Viry’s 
grave, recalled to mind two of her little companions 
who had died at her age — not that she wished to 
die, but the idea haunted her ; she wondered to whom 
she should leave her prayer-book, who would have 
her little pictures, her confirmation medal. When 
she read her mass book she instinctively turned to 
the prayers for the dead, taking delight in certain 
Latin words of that service that sounded dark and 
gloomy. She did not conjure up these fancies, but 
felt drawn toward them by mysterious voices. (Wnd 
these thoughts did not fill her with the terror they 
inspire to older people, who cling to life and are un- 
able to tear themselves away from it^ Philomene 
considered the possibility of death without fear, 
almost with indifference, and although she did not 
invite it, she did not repel the idea. ^She had 
grown accustomed to the thought, and she would 
have aeccepted death with the unconcern and dis- 
regard for life so often seen in young girls before 
they attain womanhood7\ 

^'Her piety was increased by these ideas ; she be- 
came more zealous, more ecstatic. She pondered 
upon all the words by which the church conjures 
up the image of death and its negation. She dwelt 
with a certain bitter delight on the images and ex- 
pressions of woe scattered here and there through 
her mystical books of piety, like black crosses in a 
cemetery. 

If, however, her piety had become more fervent, 


SISTER PHILOMENB. 


45 


her temper had lost its equanimity, and Philomene, 
who till then had been so gentle, was now irritable 
and impatient. (She gave way to anger even with 
Celine, and would burst into tears when her friend 
asked what was the matter. Some days she could 
not help crying.') vThe sisters found her lacking in 
deference and cheerful alacrity ; she manifested a 
dislike to washing up the dishes, cooking the din- 
ner, all the different services she had to perform 
in her turn, and she showed her dislike by a cross 
and sulky manner ; in fact, she was quite an altered 
person. Her appetite, too, became capricious, full 
of whimsical fancies, which denial only exas- 
perated. For two months she kept teasing her' 
aunt to bring her a pot of mustard, which the old 
woman always forgot. Then her eyes became af- 
fected, and she suffered from ophthalmia. The sister 
in charge of the dispensary attended to her, but 
ointments proved of no avail ; the disease increased, 
and it was therefore decided that Philomene 
should be sent to Monsieur Lelaton’s gratuitous 
consultation, held every Thursday at the School 
of Medicine. As this would have wasted a whole 
day for the sister who taught or the sister who 
looked over the work-room, her aunt was requested 
to take charge of her on that day. Her aunt came 
an hour earlier than Philomene expected, as she 
wished to take her niece home to breakfast, and to 
show Monsieur Henry how tall the girl had grown. 

The child hardly spoke to her aunt as they went 


46 


SISTEB PHILOMENE. 


along, so anxious was she to reach home, and she 
walked on ahead, hastening by her feverish pace 
the lagging steps of the old woman, who hurried 
to overtake her. At last they reached the street, 
the house, the stairs, and finally the door of the 
new apartment Monsieur Henry had taken after 
his mother’s death. Immediately the door was 
opened, Philomene dashed in; she wanted to see 
everything; look at everything; such a thing was 
new, that other she rememberd of old; and she 
,went from one thing to another, touching the relics 
of her childhood, or marveling at all the unknown 
and astonishing refinements of a young man’s 
newly furnished rooms. Q^nd when she timidly 
entered Monsieur Henry’s room, clinging like a 
child to her aunt’s gown, her heart throbbed vio- 
lently.'^ 

,^-v,Monsieur Henry, in a blue jacket and trousers 
embroidered in red, stood in front of a mirror 
fastened by the handle to the window. He was 
shaving himself with the proud and busy mien of a 
lad of twenty, shaving for the third time in his life, 
and thereby assuming the importance of a man. 
“Ah ! it’s your little girl,” he said, raising his head 
to shave under his chin; “my beard is so hard.” And 
then turning round, half-shaved, holding his tortoise- 
shell razor on high : “ Oh, I should not have known 

you again; what a big girl you are! Well, are you 
pleased to come out to spend the day with your 
aunt? Ah, yes, it’s true your eyes are bad; it 


SISTER PHILOMENE 


47 


won’t be anything serious. Leave them alone.” 
Then addressing himself to her aunt, ‘‘ I hope you 
are going to give her a good breakfast. Now, 
where are my varnished boots? I am going out.” 

" When Philomene went back at four o’clcock she 
was left for a few minutes in the parlor while her 
aunt explained to the sister the oculist’s prescrip- 
tion and the treatment that must be followed. The 
pale gray daylight was on the wane, and its cold 
gleams whitened the window curtains and threw 
dim and colorless reflections on the chocolate- 
colored walls, on the worn tiles, on the polished 
wood-work of the chairs, on the wicker arm chair 
of the Sister-Superintendent, on the great walnut 
press in which the linen sent to be hemmed or 
marked by the children in the orphanage was kept. 

^Nothing was changed in the parlor, everything was 
in its accustomed place, and yet everything there 
now looked unfamiliar to the little girl. She seemed 
to see with different eyes the two lithographic por- 
traits of the Mothers-Superior in the black wooden 
frames, the wax figure of the Virgin over the 
mantelpicee, the china vases with Marie in gilt let- 
ters upon them, and the tawdry hawthorn nose- 
gay of faded yellow paper. She wondered what 
had happened to the room and its contents that 
she found it so different. Looking mechanically 
round the parlor and noticing for the first time its 
cold, bare, and icy aspect, -she suddenly felt a 
sensation of forlornness, the anguish of isolation, 


48 


SISTEE PHILOMENR 


like that she had felt on the day she first entered 
the convent. 

Celine, who had been anxiously waiting her re- 
turn, threw her arms round her neck when she saw 
her, and plied her with questions about the doctor, 
what he had said and ordered. Philomene an- 
swered shortly in a few words, and began quickly 
to tell her of the lovely apartment she had been to, 
of her aunt’s kitchen and its look-out on trees, and 
of the little room where her aunt said she would 
work when she would have left the convent. ^And 
all she had seen that seemed to her so fine, so 
magnificent, fascinating, and unknown hurried to 
her lips, that trembled with emotion and smiled at 
the recollection. It was a headlong outpouring, 
which only stopped for her to take breath in a caress 
or in a kiss, and ran on inexhaustibly from story 
to story, from the trimmed cap her aunt had tried 
on her to the lather of soap Monsieur Henry had 
stuck on her cheek in kissing her^ At last Philo- 
mene perceived that Celine remained silent, and did 
not seem to share in her ecstacy. 

-^“Philomene,” Celine now said in a gentle, solemn 
tone, when we are in bed to-night we will make 
a spiritual retreat in the tomb of Christ, and implore 
him to grant us a love for meditation and con- 
templation.” 

After this epsiode, Philomene was seized afresh 
with a paroxysm of fervor and piety. Giving to 
prayer all the time she could possibly devote to it, 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


49 


she strove, as it were, to prolong its echo within 
her by keeping up during her work a murmur of 
prayer on her lips and a constant thought of it in 
her mind. 

During play-time she wrote religious exercises; 
she confessed and communicated whenever she was 
permitted to do so, and at Saint Laurent, during 
mass and vespers, she was so completely absorbed 
that nothing had the power to withdraw her atten- 
tion nor turn her thoughts from God. 

This enthuiasm lasted nearly two years. Then 
it seemed to her as if little by little an unknown 
power that she could hardly subdue, and which 
must eventually conquer her, were taking posses- 
sion of her. Her peace of mind, her will even, dis- 
appeared amid the fears and anxieties she could 
not suppress, fwhen she wished to pray she no 
longer found the same facility, the same inclina- 
tion that had formerly borne her along without an 
effort."^ The Divine Presence became to her only 
an idea instead of a sensation, and Philomene was 
still convinced but no longer penetrated by it. (^11 
the spiritual food that had till now sustained her 
had in the same way become tasteless and had lost 
its invigorating sweetness.) Now her faith had no 
raptures and suavity to uphold her against the bit- 
terness, melancholy, discontent, impatience, and 
restless agitations with which her conscience was 
struggling^ She felt temptations draw round her, 
and these temptations, which it would formerly 


50 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


have hardly cost her a moment’s reflection to cast 
aside, now preoccupied her like a fixed idea, and by 
dint of dreading them, she fell under their haunt- 
ing influence. At the same time, in the midst of 
all this languor and cooling fervor, her defenseless 
soul was harassed by an ideal of perfection which 
it could not attain, but toward which it was forever 
bounding as in a paroxysm of fever, with aspira- 
tions, resolutions, and longings, by vows of rules 
and penitence. Then, worn out out by clutching 
at this phantom of holiness, she san back into 
restlessness and uncertainty. She secretly rebelled 
against mortifications ; her obedience was no longer 
eager, her imagination was a torture, and whatever 
will she had left seemed to her a will from which 
ail grace had fled.'v^ 

Thus did this soul, which had known all the joy 
of absorption in God, strive and waste away in the 
struggle. Each day destroyed something, extin- 
guished some ardor; each day aggravated the 
disease so deadly to faith, the disease the Church 
calls dryness, comparing, as it does, the souls that 
suffer from it to arid lands without water. And the 
more she struggled, the more she strove to cure 
the evil, the more she eagerly strained toward the 
ideal of perfection she had neglected to seek for in 
the hour of health and repose— the more she suf- 
fered, and the more her mind was confused and un- 
certain. Disbelief alone could end this conflict, in 
which the poor child was torn to pieces by her own 


SISTEB PHILOMENE. 


51 


thoughts, and Philomene had not yet reached that 
state. (^She prayed, nevertheless, but was not com- 
forted. 

Why did those things that formerly appealed to 
her no longer touch her? Often and often she 
sadly turned back to her prayer-book, a shabby lit- 
tle leather-covered book with a gold line round it 
and blue-tinted edges, a book similar to every other 
of the kind published by Adrien Leclerc, printer 
to our Holy Father the Pope, and to his Grace the 
Archbishop of Paris. In order to protect' it she 
had encased it in a neatly stitched black merino 
wrapper, fastened by a couple of dark mother-of- 
pearl buttons and loops that made a kind of clasp. 
Between the cover and the binding she had 
placed all the scraps of paper she had relating to 
her aunt and Madame de Viry, and the few letters 
she had ever received. In the book itself, the 
edges of which were so faded and thumbed that 
they had assumed the color of dry moss, she had 
crammed between every page — till the volume was 
nearly bursting — a number of sacred images, 
prayers to the Sacred Heart, and flowers picked 
during her walks, which for her represented memor- 
able dates. This book, the book of her first Com- 
munion, the receptacle of her souvenirs and her 
hopes, she had prized as a relic and a friend. 
How she opened it, turned over the leaves, and saw 
nothing more in it than in other books— lines and 
letters— and she closed it again as a thing dead. 


62 


SISTER PHILOMENR 


Celine saw Philomene’s struggles, and strove to aid 
and calm her. She longed to endow her with some 
of her strength of will, resolution, simple faith, and 
the sentiments of a vocation that time only made 
more certain and powerful ; but Philomene, self- 
shamed, rebuffed her, and finally begging to be left 
alone, drew herself away from her friend^ Then 
Celine would send her notes every evening after sup- 
per, asking her to kiss her when they met on their 
way to the dormitory, and with this kiss, in which 
she would have wished to seize hold of Philomene’s 
soul and bear it away to God, Celine would slip into 
her hand a little folded paper, carefully ruled, on 
which she had written in copy-book handwriting, 
“Gifts of piety that render God’s service pleasant 
and sweet;” or else, “Fruit of Charity that unites 
us to God through love.” When Philomene’s even- 
ing kiss was cold or indifferent, or that she seemed 
merely to put up her cheeks from habit, instead of 
the little papers, Celine would slip into her hand 
long letters scribbled in pencil unknown to the sis- 
ters, such as, “ God has put into my heart an affection 
pleasing to Him. I shall strive to be with you what I 
think God wishes ; for He commands us not only to 
love Him, but also to make Him be loved. I trust 
that if you pray to Mary she will receive you 
among her children, and we will strive by our 
good example to kindle in the hearts of our com- 
panions the desire to become one of her family. 
Be more devout, and I will pray God Almighty to 


SISTER PHILOMENK 


53 


help you.” Such were the tone and phraseology of 
these letters, which Celine always signed, “Her 
who is always your friend in the blessed heart of 
Jesus and Mary.” This went on, till at last Philo- 
mene, wearied out, impatiently, angrily even, 
pushed aside the scribbled scrap of paper Celine 
held out to her. > 

’ Philomene now found a diversion and relief in 
some new fancies that had taken possession of 
her. Thoughts of marriage ran through her brain, 
not ind ed a settled plan, but vaguely confusedly,) 
softly vailed, like objects visible in the distance. 
She did not think of any one in particular whom she 
would wish to marry; she had no precise notion in- 
deed about marriage, but turned to the thought in- 
stinctively and calmly as something that might be^) 
And her imagination conjured up the pure, white- 
robed figure, which, to a little girl, is the lasting 
impression left of a wedding — the white dress and 
wreath of orange blossoms?^ Then at times she 
dreamed of still greater happiness, of a community 
of spirit, a two-fold existence, of devotedness, of 
mysterious joys that she knew not, for which she 
knew no name, but which must surely dawn on the 
bright horizon of a new lifeT^ 

She was still an innocent child, knowing nothing, 
divining nothing; her ingenuousness was also 
greater than usual at her age ; for instance, on one 
occasion, when several of her playmates, the eldest 


54 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


of whom was younger than herself, were talking 
together, one of them happened to say : 

Did you see how Berthe blushed when she met 
her cousin in the parlor? Certainly she has a liking 
for him.” 

“How silly you are,” retorted another ; “it does 
not make you blush; it makes you turn pale.” 
^“Dear me!” said Philomene, “I thought one only 
turned pale when hurt.” 

Two great voids were suddenly created in Philo- 
mene’s existence. Sister Marguerite was sent to 
the south for a few months to recruit her health, 
and Celine left the orphanage to begin her novitiate 
at the Mother House of the Sisters of Saint Augus- 
tine. 

From this moment the convent life became in- 
supportable to Philomene ; it was worse than 
solitude. She was seized with desperate longings 
to leave it, to run away and go to her aunt. The 
atmosphere, the walls, the very sky overhead, all 
became odious to her, and her health gave way 
under the ennui that devoured her, both body and 
soul. The sisters became anxious, and allowed her 
aunt to visit her oftener ; the convent fare, that 
seemed to disgust Philomene so that she hardly 
touched it, was replaced by more delicate food. 
Notwithstanding all this care,QThilomene grew 
paler and thinner, and her eyes seemed larger and 
more feverish in her wan little face.^ One day, 
after six months, on the occasion of a visit from her 


SISTER PHILOMENR 


65 


aunt, she threw herself into the old woman’s arms, 
and hugging her and crying at the same time, im- 
plored her to take her away, saying she would die 
there, that she felt as if some serious illness were 
hanging over her. Her aunt had need of all her 
courage to reply, that it was quite impossible to 
take her away, that she was still too young ; but 
she promised to have her home when she would be 
twenty, and when in all probability, Monsieur Henry 
would be married and she could be his wife’s maid. 

last tear rolled down Philomene’s cheek, but she 
did not utter a word. 

At the end of a week her aunt received a letter 
in which Philomene said she was very sorry for 
the scene she had made, that she had waited a few 
days to see if her good resolutions held out. The 
letter ended as follows, “. . . . I hope that by the 
grace of God and the advice of our good Mother 
Superior this will not occur again. I shall not 
leave this establishment, but, by the will of God 
and your consent, perhaps I shall only leave i^to 
enter — I say no more at present ; time will speak 
for me.” Her aunt, attaching no importance to 
this last phrase, was quite reassured by the letter. 
However, the anxiety of the sisters was awakened, 
two or three of their young girls having died of a 
decline similar to that Philomene was suffering 
from. They noticed that Philomene ate nothing 
at meals ; she even tried to disguise the fact by hid- 
mg her bread up her sleeves.\ The convent doctor 


56 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


declared after examining Philomene, that her 
digestive organs were already affected, and the 
sisters, alarmed, sent at once for her aunt, who 
hearing what the doctor had said, immediately took 
the child away. 

^.Monsieur Henry was just then traveling in Italy ; 
the old woman could therefore devote all her 
time to her niece, amuse her and take her out walk- 
ing during her convalescence. And holding out to 
the poor girl the prospect of a future in which they 
should always be together, telling her how useful 
she would be to her in her old age, she gradually 
and gently brought back to life and hope this 
crushed and weary heart.-n,/-^ 

One morning the door bell rang loudly. It was 
Monsieur Henry. 

' ‘‘vHow do you do, old woman? All right, eh?” 
said the young man. “Ah, this is your niece; how 
pale she is ! I say, your aunt tells me >ou have be- 
come dused pious.” (And he burst out laughing, 
and kissed her on both cheeks, Philomene trembled 
all over.3 

“Give me a match ; you must take care of your- 
self,” resumed Monsieur Henry, puffing away at 
a cigar “ and not do too much. Get out my clothes, 
old woman ; I want to take a turn on the boule- 
vards. Has a letter come from the Rue des Martyrs? 
By the by, I’ve brought you something, Philomene 
—a rosary— one blessed at Rome. It is somewhere 
in my box. Ah, while I think of it, I am going to 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


57 


confide to you a most important charge — you will 
see that my shirts have all the buttons on.” 

Whereupon Monsieur Henry went out, and .did 
not return till the following day. 

C From that time Monsieur Henry’s service became 
Philomene’s sole preoccupation.*^ She taxed her in- 
genuity and strove to surprise him by her thought- 
ful attentions. She endeavored to find out his 
favorite habits and pet fancies. Never was a stitch 
wanting to Monsieur Henry’s gloves; his ties were 
always clean; the smallest details of his toilet 
were as carefully attended to as though the eye of 
an old-fashioned provincial mother had scrutinized 
and inspected them. All the knick-knacks in his 
room, which her old aunt often left undusted and 
in disorder, were now carefully tidied and neatly 
placed ready to his hand. Monsieur Henry seemed 
delighted at being so well served, but he scarcely 
thanked Philomene, except by an absent “ Good- 
day,” or some broad, good-natured joke. At break- 
fast, while Philomene waited on him, he was ab- 
sorbed in the newspaper, propped against his 
glass, and hardly vouchsafed her a “thank you.” 
After breakfast and three pipes smoked in silence, 
he would take up his hat and disappear for the day. 

This bachelor establishment, giving but little 
work to the aunt and niece, left their evenings free. 
When the winter months came round, the old wo- 
man not knowing how to keep herself awake, ac- 
quired the habit of going down into the porter’s 


58 


SISTER P HILO MEN E. 


lodge, where all the different servants of the 
house met and in turns treated each other to tea. 
First there was the porter with a pince-nez that he 
affectionately toyed with — a short, fat widower, 
well informed on money matters and knowing how 
to turn his money to account in all sorts of invest- 
ments and underhand loans. Then there was a fel- 
low with a brown-bread complexion and coarse 
red lips, the groom of a stock-broker living on the 
first floor, and who, owing to his master’s encour- 
agements — the said master being flattered by his 
style — tried with a hoarse voice to catch the low 
tone of the servants in the plays at the Palais Royal. 
Then there was the cook of the lady on the 
second floor, a foreign lady, who ostensibly gave 
card-parties and was said to be a Russian spy 
— a big Flemish woman, always half -tipsy, bursting 
with fat and exploding with laughter and low mirth. 
Often, too, this Flemish woman would bring her 
husband, the most villainous type of cab-driver, a 
man whose nose and forehead exhaled alcohol at 
all hours of the day, and his chin, disfigured by 
some skin disease, was half hidden in a filthy muf- 
fler. Two or three flighty maids of disreputable 
women, ferret-featured and coarse-mouthed, made 
up this select society, to which may be added the 
nurse of a paralyzed man, h^ red nose adorned by 
a black wart. 

These people were indeed enough to make one 
sick.\ The men and women reeked of wine, corrup- 


SISTER PIIILOMENR 


59 


tion, envy, sloth — all the vices of domesticity., 

( Their instincts and tastes seemed impregnated with 
the odors of the stable, of all kinds of grease and 
filthi The vices they had caught in listening to 
their masters had in them become still more de- 
based, just as the remains of an orgy moulder 
away on the pantry shelves. Their mouths only 
uttered foul protestations and base accusations; 
their talk was of revengeful anonymous letters, 
and their discussions of impudent ways of robbing, 
wasting, and pilfering, of brazen theories on theft, 
and of keeping accounts with four purses — the silk 
stocking purse, or the dripping perquisites; the 
sou in the franc purse, or so much per cent ; the 
pickings purse, or shopping gains ; and the market 
penny purse. This was followed by the ogress 
laugh of the Flemish woman, the chaff of the cad- 
dish grooms, the slang of the maids, and the hor- 
rible language of the sick-nurse. vTheir voices, 
words and mirth struck a chill; it sounded like 
convicts making merryT^ 

^^jGrifted with a strong dose of stupidity, on which 
Paris life had made little impression, Philomene’s 
aunt did not realize nor fathom the depravation 
of these vicious people. She laughed like the rest, 
but her faithfulness, her natural honesty and 
thorough disinterestedness, made her listen with- 
out comprehending, and she lived in the midst of 
this corruption not only without feeling tempted to 
imitate it, but unconscious of its existence. \On the 


60 


SISTER P HILO MEN E. 


other hand, while Philomene was at first startled 
and instinctiv^ely alarmed, her very ignorance con- 
cealed from her the ugliest side of these folk!^ She 
heard much that she did not understand — words 
with double meaning that had no sense for her; 
phrases finished off by gestures, the indecency of 
which was unknown to her; shameless avowals 
that she listened to as mere inventions. At first, 
however, they had a certain respect for her candor 
and the innocence of her youth. In her presence 
the cynical speeches assumed a kind of reserve, 
and moreover, in the porter’s lodge everybody 
petted with coarse amiability the niece of Monsieur 
Henry’s housekeeper. Indeed, the groom, who 
always heard his master talking of the practigal 
side of life, had from the first gauged the position. 
From the outset he had refiected that Philomene’s 
aunt was the old and valued servant of a bachelor ; 
that if he married the niece — and he viewed his 
position of husband with much philosophy — and 
though his wife entered Monsieur Henry’s establish- 
ment, he might settle down in it, eventually replace 
the aunt, who was but mortal, and in good time be- 
come the real master of a house in which there was 
nothing to do and where the master was supposed 
to be an easy-going young man. ^Such was the 
plan he at once conceived, and he accordingly be- 
gan paying his court to Philomene by offering her 
bunches of faded violets and launching coarse com- 
pliments at her, of a style that savored more of 


SISTER PHILOMENK 


61 




fisticuffs. ^At the groom’s first attentions an in- 
surmountable disgust took possession of Philomene 
and opened her eyes ; a sudden perception revealed 
to her in one instant the man and his associates, 
and now she drew back when they wished to em- 
brace hei^ However, as she was too shy openly 
to show her feelings, the domestics set down her 
marked coolness toward the groom to mere school- 
girl whims. ^ 

Her aunt did not notice her revulsion of feeling, 
and continued to drag her to these parties. One 
evening the groom — having been given a box at 
the Gaite by his master’s mistress, who acted at 
that theater — had invited both aunt and niece, and 
Philomene had to remain there for four hours side 
by side with the groom, to whom the obscurity of 
the box lent confidence, while at every moment the 
Flemish cook, excited like all common people at a 
play, screamed out to her at the top of her voice, 
“I say, my girl, you’re having fine fun!” Fora 
moment Philomene hoped she would faint. 

She continued to wait on Monsieur Henry at 
breakfast, and Monsieur Henry always read his 
newspaper. (^Philomene longed for a word, a re- 
mark, a question ; she would even have been satis- 
fied with the caress he mechanically bestowed on 
the old cat^ She longed to sacrifice herself for the 
young man, whose image had remained united in 
her youthful imagination to all the fascinating 
domination of her childhood’s dreams.^ Had he 


62 


SISTEB PBILOMENE. 


been ill, she would willingly have spent nights 
nursing him ; had he suddenly lost all his money, 
she would have only been too happy to serve him 
for nothing. , She thought of all kinds of misfor- 
tunes and catastrophes that might give her the op 
portunity of showing her affection and of making 
some return to the family to whom she owed all. 
A request for a plate or a silver knife to peel a pear 
would rouse her painfully from these thoughts, in 
which she absorbed herself as in a golden dream, 
wishing almost that these misfortunes and catas- 
trophes would occur. (^Some days she would have 
implored monsieur to scold her, to reproach her 
with some neglect, to show some displeasure — any- 
thing, indeed, if he would only have noticed her. 

The coarseness of her surroundings and the in- 
difference of her young master made the poor girl 
suffer cruelly. She felt ill and weary, and the 
whole atmosphere around her seemed to smother her 
or to be a blank. The fact was that under the con- 
vent education her intelligence alone had remained 
that of the people, in keeping with her class in life, 
and in harmony with her future, while the rest of 
her faculties had been cultivated and raised to a 
high degree of sensitiveness. The religious educa- 
tion, with all its enervating culture, had refined all 
the aspirations of her mind, and by the spirituality 
of its nature borne the child far away from the in- 
stincts and morality of her equals, so that Philo- 
mene experienced in the sphere that was her own a 


SISTEB FHILOMENE. 


63 


jarring sensation of discomfort, the vague impres- 
sion of a fall and exile. Life, which she now saw 
in all its crudity, wounded every feeling within her, 
and she could not accustom herself to its blows. 
The materialism of the passions, sentiment, and af- 
fections, the brutality of the impressions, actions, 
and language natural to workingmen or servants, 
estranged her from the men, who inspired her with 
both fear and contempt. ^Neither did the women, 
on the other hand, attract her, and she did not feel 
any affinity with creatures who appeared so dif- 
ferent from her and seemed, indeed, of a sex dif- 
ferent from her own) Often in that low company 
tastes and cravihgs would impatiently arise within 
her; she felt drawn toward a certain elegance, a 
certain amibility of intercourse, certain proprieties 
that she could not have defined, but of which, like 
a well-bred person, she felt the want. For what 
really affected her most painfully was not so much 
the ignorance of the servants, or their infamous 
and wicked natures, but the form in which this 
ignorance, infamy, and low nature was manifested. ->/ 
' Their cynicism, which was new to her, pained 
her almost in a physical manner. And the young 
girl, who did not know much more than to read and 
write, who was totally deficient of mother wit, and 
whose brain was only filled with books of piety and 
a few simple novels, who by her intelligence was 
assuredly inferior to most of these men and women, 
actually compared herself in this company to an 


64 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


unfortunate soul in purgatory, so much did she en- 
dure from this suffering, which was one of instinct 
and sensation^^.,^ 

The young girhs heart was overflowing with ten- 
derness, which met with no more response than her 
delicate attentions were welcomed with satisfaction. 
Her convent life had not only over-refined her soul, 
but had also ripened her heart in its hot-house at- 
mosphere ; and all that discipline and mortifications 
had suppressed of ardor in her nascent senses had 
only intensified the fervor of her amorous aspira-^ . 
tions. Naturally affectionate, her heart was filled 
with tender yearnings by the voluptuous suavity of 
her religious books, by their ever-repeated imagery 
of perfumes and flowers — dews of May, celestial 
odors, fragrant roses and lilies ; it had softened in 
the church atmosphere, in the murmur of the 
orisons sweet as mystic kisses, under the penetrat- 
ing gentleness of the confessor’s voice, before the 
Sacred Heart, which the sisters told her she must 
mentally bear like a flower on her bosom. It was a 
heart painfully attuned to love that she brought to 
confession — to the sacramant a heart ardently pre- 
pared for it. ^Love, love resounded all around her, 
and under the flame of this scorching word, in her 
prostrations before the spouse of her soul, the king 
of her love, the beloved of her heart, in her aspira- 
tions toward Divine love, sweeter to her than honey, 
she had felt her heart dissolve in tenderness and 
swoon in the rapturous love that inspired Correggio 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


65 


and Saint Francois de Sales with a vision of the 
Virgin’s death. Such was the heart the young girl 
had brought away with her from the convent, and 
it was with a terrible anguish she felt it overflow 
within her. 

Philomene resigned herself to life, notwithstand- 
ing her sufferings ; but she carefully hid them, as a 
wounded man will with his hand compress and con- 
ceal his wound. Who could she confide in? Her 
aunt would not have understood her; moreover, she 
feared to profane her sufferings by acknowledging 
it. 

One evening that she had gone up to bed. Mon- 
sieur Henry, who was in the habit of staying out 
all night, returned home. He was slightly intoxi- 
cated, and had, moreover, the cheerful expansion 
of a man who has copiously dined. He spoke loud, 
and in a thick voice, stammering out his words. 

say, old girl,” he said to the aunt, stretching 
himself in an arm-chair, “ you ought really to have 
had nephews — instead of nieces! Young girls, do 
you see — young girls are not always convenient 
in a bachelor’s house. How, this evening— this 
evening I should — not have come home alone; 
but what an infernal row there’d have been — 
about that child! You’d have been so cross— of 
course — I know girls must be respected— but it’s an 
awful — awful bore. I say this— you know— not to 
make you send her away — eh? — no— but you told 
me one day that she loved that wretched groom. 


66 


SISTER PHILOMENE. 


Well — let them marry — because, a married woman 
— a married woman — can hear and see anything — a 

married woman can — whereas your dused niece^ ” 

-^.The sound of a fall, of a heavy thud like a bundle 
thrown down, was heard outside the door. It was 
Philomene, who hearing the bell while she was yet 
on the back-stairs, and recognizing Monsieur 
Henry’s ring, had come down stairs again to bid 
him good-night; she had let herself in with her 
latch-key, had stepped noiselessly along the pas- 
sage, had listened, heard— and fainted dead away 
on the ground. 

Her aunt and Monsieur Henry, who was sobered 
in an instant, dashed water in her face and slapped 
the palms of her hands. When she came to herself 
she was writhing in a fit of hysterics and seated 
on an arm-chair Monsieur Henry had placed be- 
fore the open window. A fiood of tears relieved 
her, but she remained dazed and bewildered, not 
knowing why she was there nor the reason of her 
tears ; and it was only when Monsieur Henry re- 
peated several times that he had spoken heedlessly, 
that she should never be sent away, but should do 
exactly as she pleased, and made a thousand other 
soothing speeches, as if to a sick child, that she 
remembered what had taken place. . , 

After this scene their usual life was resumed, as 
though nothing had occurred. Philomene seemed 
to have completely forgotten all, and was totally 
unembarrassed One morning, about three weeks 


SISTEB PHILOMENE. 


67 


afterward, as Monsieur Henry rose from breakfast, 
Philomene addressing him for the first time without 
his first speaking to her, said in a calm and steady 
voice he had never remarked before : 

Monsieur Henry, T want to ask your forgiveness 
— and to thank you for having been so kind to me — 
and your mother also. I shall never forget it.” 
And as Monsieur Henry looked at her in astonish- 
ment, she lifted up her face : 

“Will you kiss me. Monsieur Henry? It will be 
good-by.” 

And without giving him time to interrupt her, 
she added with an effort and hurriedly, like some 
one summoning up all their courage : 

“Yes; I am going away. I leave on Monday to 
begin my novitiate at the Sisters of Saint Augus- 
tine ; but I shall always pray for you. Monsieur 
Henry, and for your happiness.” 

Philomene spent two months of her probation in 
the Mother House of the Order of Saint Augustine, 
clothed in the black dress and little black cap of the 
postulants. At the end of these two months of exer- 
cises and religious training, of manual work in the 
house, the thorough earnestness of her vocation 
showed that she was worthy of beginnng her novi- 
tiate. The “Veni Creator” was solemnly chanted 
for her by the community, and she appeared in 
church with the white muslin vail and blue sash 
that novices wear during the services. 

Shortly after the “Yeni Creator” she was per- 


68 SISTER FHILOMENE. 

mitted to take the habit. /On this occasion she was 
dressed like a bride, in the wedding dress that had 
so long haunted her youthful dreams. A certain 
elegance and affected coquettishness, the innocent 
and last touch of coquetry for her sacrifice, was re- 
vealed in all her attire. She had assisted at high 
mass in the crowded chapel, the Superior on her 
right hand, and the Mistress of the Novices on her 
left, holding a lighted taper, emblem of the Divine 
light that illumined her soul. 

After mass the officiating priest had said, “ What 
is your request?” 

“I request admission into this holy house, to 
serve God according to the rules prescribed by our 
holy founder. Saint Augustine.” 

“Do you thoroughly know the rules?” 

“Yes.” 

And Philomene had recited out loud the rules of 
the order. 

“ Do you promise to conform to them and obey 
them?” 

“Yes, I promise so to do, by the grace of God.” 

Then the priest had delivered a long exhortation 
on the sacrifices necessary in religious life, on the 
advantages of such a life, on the dangers of the 
world, and the deceptions of those who seek for 
happiness in it, and after having again asked Philo- 
mene if she persisted in her intentions, the priest 
had cut off a lock of her hair, and she had left the 
chapel. When she returned there all her hair had 


SISTER PEILOMENK 


69 


been cut off, she was clothed in the costume of the 
order, each portion of which, one by one, had been 
blessed ; a thin wollen vail had replaced the muslin 
one, her face was swathed in white linen that half 
covered her forehead, and the ample, long woolen 
gown enveloped her in its heavy, straight folds. 

Her name in religion had been already given her. 

She had been laid under the mortuary pall, and 
while the “ De Profundis” had been sung over her, a 
prayer had risen from her heart — the prayer offered 
up while under the pall, which the nuns aver is 
always granted— a prayer imploring the grace and 
mercy of God for those who had succored and as- 
sisted her childhood. 

Three months later, the novice— who had still 
seven months of novitiate before she could pro- 
nounce her vows — was sent to the hospital at . 

She was about to replace a sister carried off by 
typhoid fever ; and this sister, whose death thus 
pointed out to Philomene the path of duty and 
charity, was her former friend, Celine, since then 
Sister Laurence. 


70 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM, 


CHAPTER IIL 

PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 

The house*surgeons were gathered together in the 
resident’s room. 

It was a vaulted hall, and the stone walls were 
running down with damp that oozed out of them. 
Opposite the gray door was a window that opened 
on to a yard two feet above the level of the floor. 
In the wall to the right of the door was a large cup- 
board used as a wardrobe and linen closet. To the 
left, over a copper fountain, hooked on to the wall 
and capped by a towel, a great, black painted set of 
pigeon-holes displayed pell-mell in its divisions 
bundles of paper, note-books, and old newspapers. 
Beyond this was a little white china stove, and an 
untidy, curtainless bed — the bed of the resident 
surgeon on duty at night. On the other side of the 
room was a great pipe-rack, and a big slate on 
which the house surgeons wrote down, in case they 
should be wanted, the name of the ward in which 
they would be found. A sheet of paper hung on a 
nail, adorned with a childish caricature of the gov- 
ernor of the hospital. On another nail was sus- 
pended another sheet of paper with a long list of 
names and ages marked in the margin— an alpha- 
betical list of patients that a doctor, anxious to 


PBOFESSIOKAL CRITICISM. 


71 


study diseases of the heart, had placed there, in 
order to be apprised of any deaths, and to be able 
to assist at the post-mortem examinations. 

/ In this room were seven men, their heads covered 
with close skull-caps, seated round a table on which 
an old woman had just placed a smoking-hot leg of 
mutton. One only among them, the surgeon on 
duty for the day, had kept on his apron; those 
belonging to the others were hung up on pegs, and 
to the lapel of their coats were fixed little pin- 
cushions, covered with red or violet-headed pins, 
which had the effect of nosegays. They were talk- 
ing. 

‘‘What! you didn’t know what had become of 
poor Lemesle? He is the medical adviser of the 
Rue Sainte-Marguerite-SaintrAntoine. . . . The 
wine-shop is his consulting room ; each consultation 
is chalked up on the wall, and each chalk-mark is 
worth a glass of spirits, and the pot-man rubs out 
the score according to his consumption.” 

“Poor fellow!” 

“So clever, too!” 

“ I say, Dubertrand, shall you go to the ball at 
Bicetre to see the lunatics dance?” 

“At what time does it come off?” 

“In the afternoon.” 

“Don’t go there . . . there’s no fun. . . . It’s 
like a ball of lawyers, . . . nothing characteristic 
about it.” 


72 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 


‘‘ There must, however, be some hysteric patients, 
and that might be amusing.” 

“Amusing! . . . No indeed! One day, at a ball 
of that sort, we — that is, the governor, Chappe, and 
I — were completely hemmed in by the creatures, 
and could not get rid of them. ...” 

“Have you ever seen them act in theatricals, 
Noel” 

“No.” 

“ Now and again, when some epileptic makes too 
much ado, they seize him and turn him out. ... I 
was with you, Pichenat, wasn’t I, when . . . ?” 

“Yes, yes.” 

“What’s the matter with you, Pichenat, this 
morning?” 

“The matter! . . . Why, I had a scene this 
morning when the rounds were made. ... I am 
furious. . . You know my chief is very aggravat- 
ing; he has only been appointed as a substi- 
tute, and you haven’t an idea what a plague 
he is! Luckily, he won’t be here more than a fort- 
night. ... If he annoys me again to-morrow, I 
shall apply for leave. . . He is really too trying ! 
One day he will order ipecacuanha all round ; the 
next day he will say : ‘No hurry, wait, let nature 
take its course ! . . ’ The day after that it will 

be, ‘Gentlemen, a waiting policy is all very well for 
idle rich people, but have we any right to pursue 
that line here? Here is a cabinet-maker who has 
to gain his livelihood and wants to be at work again 


PROFESSIONAL CRniClSM. 


73 


as soon as possible!. . . ^ And thereupon ipecac- 
uanha is ordered all round the ward ! And so it 
goes on! . . What an idiot !” 

“ Have you begun your lectures to the dressers 
yet, Noel?” 

“Yes.” 

“How many attend?” 

“About twenty.” 

“ Haven’t you a fellow called Girardeau in your 
class?” 

“Yes,. . and he does well. I believe we shall 
make something of him.” 

“ He comes from my part of the world. I com- 
mend him to you. He is poor. They lost every- 
thing in ’48. . . Besides that, his father is blind . . 
and he supports him.” 

“As he walks?” 

“No, no; by giving lessons in music and spelling 
in the intervals of his medical studies. . . ” 

“Monsieur Pichenat, you are wanted in the 
Sainte-Marthe ward,” said the old woman who 
waited on the surgeons. 

“ Have you not got some numbers of the Medical 
Gazette at home?” 

“I believe I have got some.” 

“You will bring them back, won’t you?” 

“Who is Number 47?” inquired Pichenat as he 
re-entered the room. 

“How should I know? That’s rather good. . . . 


74 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 


I can remember the patients by their illness, but 
not by their number.” 

‘‘Barnier, have you read Kuneau’s work on the 
use of baths in the time of the Komans?” 

“No, he has not sent it tome. . . Is it a thick 
book?” 

“ A volume no thicker than my thumb. I have 
not cut it yet.” 

“ It may be interesting, . . . but he should have 
taken a wider view of the subject — made a philo- 
sophic and historic study of medicine generally. 
Why did he not seize upon the low morals of an- 
tiquity as a whole, the scandals of Greek and 
Koman society . . . There was a subject for him ! 
And then his book would have been quite the 
fashion.” 

‘‘What has become of Thierry?” 

“ I saw him to-day in the school of medicine. . . . 
He composed his essay in thirty hours!” 

“You don’t say so!” 

“He’s a wag, is Thierry. One day he borrowed 
from me a superb tumor, on pretense of analyzing 
it with the aid of the microscope. As he is a better 
hand at the microscope than I am, . . . and as I 
had no time. . . in short, I gave him all I had 
done, . . . and when I went to ask him for the 
analysis he told me he was going to use it him- 
self, . . . that he had not finished ; ... all kinds 
of excuses!” 


PB0FE8SI0NAL CRITICISM, 


75 


“ Theft of a tumor ! The case is not provided for 
by law.” 

“There’s a knock at the door.” 

“Come in!” 

A young man entered, with long hair falling over 
a red woolen comforter. He was a candidate for 
the fifth examination in medicine, and came to ask 
about the diseases of the various patients on whom 
he was to be interrogated. They replied : 

“Go up stairs. . . You will find some one about.” 

When he had shut the door behind him : 

“There’s cool cheek, to come and ask us to do the 
examiners in that way, without even bringing a 
recommendation from any one!” 

“He’s as artful as a cochineal!” 

“Madame Bizet!” 

The old woman came forward. 

“What’s this food? Have you ever eaten human 
flesh?” 

“Oh, monsieur!” 

“Well, Madame Bizet, this is precisely the same 
thing. ... Do you think you have any clear idea, 
Madame Bizet, as to what may be the taste of 
human flesh?” 

“ Lor’ ! how dreadful ! . . . I don’t know. . . It 
must be like rabbit, I should think.” 

^No, Madame Bizet, you are wrong; it is a flavor 
between mutton and beef. I don’t only speak from 
the accounts of travelers, you know, Madame Bizet. 
One day a woman was brought here who had been 


76 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 


trying to asphyxiate herself ; she had fallen on the 
brazier. Her arm was roasted. . . to a turn. If 
you could only cook your chops as well, Madame 
Bizet!” 

“ Talking of chops, do you know that the com- 
missariat actually refused one the other day to my 
chief for a patient?” 

“Disgusting, ’pon my word!” 

“And what did your chief say?” 

“ nothing.” 

“He is generally down on them for things like 
that .” 

“He simply gave the sister ten francs to buy 
chops for the patient.” 

“Ah, here comes the doctor!” 

There was a shout from the whole party, as a 
former student, who had just received his diploma, 
entered, carrying a bundle of his theses in blue 
paper covers under his arm. 

“Have breakfast, eh?” 

“Yes.” 

“Madame Bizet^ . . a napkin.” 

“Yes, sir.” And the old woman brought the doc- 
tor the napkin reserved for guests— a white pillow 
cover. 

“Our warmest congratulations, old fellow.” 

The doctor sat down, amid many hand-shakes, 
saying in a melancholy tone : 

“Not that I am a bit cheerful, though!” 

“How so?” 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 


77 


“ To leave Paris. ...” 

“Where are you going?” 

“ I am going to practice at Peronne. . .* Ah ! ugh ! 
a country town!” 

And he began to eat mournfully. 

^ “ Ah 1 I understand. Do you remember our first 
year at Bicetre, eh, doctor? That was a fine time. 
What larks we had! . . . Our rooms were over 
those of the retired list, who retire after thirty 
years^ service in the hospitals — les reposants, as 
they are called. They did not rest much, I can tell 
you. We used to spend the night rolling logs in 
the passages. . . Lorry made such an awful row 
with his violin. . . Then they were not particular 
as to the visits we received. . . Just imagine, we 
used to make punch on the roof ! That was a game 
that used to send comets across the observatory tele- 
scopes. . . And on the Bicetre fete day — that was 
when we were at our best! The Bicetre fellows 
would not let us dance. . . . There were more than 
twenty of us. The officers took our part. . . . What 

a row we did make It appears that it is all 

changed now. The students are watched, the con- 
cierge has to make reports ; they are expected to 
behave like a parcel of schoolgirls, and not to snore 
at night !”’w 

“Do you remember, Barneir, that brute of a 
patient who threatened to thrash me when he got 
out?” 

“Yes; because you kept him on low diet.” 


78 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 


“Well, I met him the other day on the Pont des 
Arts.^^ 

“Ah?” 

“Yes, and I had mended him too well, evidently, 
for he seemed as strong as a Turk. ... I took the 
other side of the bridge.” 

There was a clear, sharp ring, and almost at the 
same moment the shadow of a bier stopping before 
the window took away half the daylight from the 
room. 

“Yes,” said a house-surgeon to the doctor, it is 
always at this hour and at this spot just as it was in 
your time, . . . cross-post for eternity !” 

“Pass me the brandy.” 

“ Which pipe will you have? Death^s head, or the 
lead-poisoned face?” 

“No, the other.” 

There was a knock at the door. 

“Come in!” 

“Monsieur Pichenat,” said a ward-maid,” it’s for 
a woman you are wanted — a birth.” 

“Just one’s luck! Something always turns up 
just as one has lighted a pipe.” 

“Grumble away! You would have had cause to 
do that if you had been in my place two years ago. 
That was a hospital where one was kept going all 
day. And the nights ! I calculated I was called 
up seven times on an average. . . . And then that 
confounded step of the attendant in the court-yard 
and coming up the stairs. Then in the morning at 


PB0FE8SI0NAL CRITICISM. 


79 


six o’clock a drumming at the door ! Come in ! A 
burial sheet to sign. When I think that it was an 
idiot for a house-surgeon who gave the committee 
the idea of verifying a death! What a notion! 
Patients who had been a couple of months dying in 
a ward. . . ("Why, they have been dead long enough 
before any one notices it, only they obstinately 
continue to breathe f) . ” 

“ Are the operations satisfactory just now?” asked 
the doctor. 

‘‘So-so!” 

“1^0, for some time past they have not done well.” 

“There is sometimes a run of bad luck.” 

“ And what is annoying about it is that it does not 
depend upon the surgeon. The operation may be 
perfectly well done ; it is a bit of bad luck, like a 
hand at lansquenet. . . . One passes or not. . . . 
Positively, it is a toss-up. . .” 

“Yes, it is a chance. . . For instance, last year 
my chief fell ill; . . he had just done five-and- 
twenty operations, one after another, without a 
single drawback, and very serious operations, mind 
YOU. Harder was sent to replace him. . . . You 
know Harder is every bit as good. Well, he did 
five operations; all died! When it came to the 
sixth, he put his instruments in his pocket and left 
and did not return.” 

“ He was quite right to my mind.” 

“They are not as unlucky here as in the hospital 
I have just come from. For the last two years they 


80 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM, 


have lost every case. . . It was no joke at last. 
At one time on the men’s side, there was purulent 
infection on the third floor, lockjaw on the second, 
and hospital pyaemia on the first. ...” 

“Well done!” 

“ What is curious is that they lose many more in 
Paris than in the provinces, . . . where they are 
often famously hacked about.” 

“ Come, come, there are very good surgeons in the 
provinces ; one must not confound them all in one 
condemnation.” 

Pichenat, who had returned, had seated himself 
in the principal arm-chair, and amused himself by 
teasing his neighbor with one of the peeled sticks 
which the students used as fencing sticks. Sud- 
denly this neighbor sprang from his chair upon the 
table. 

“ What is the matter with you, Mali voire? Why 
are you figuring away on the table ?” 

“No; I have only got onto the rostrum , gravely 
replied the young surgeon, answering to the name 
of Malivoire, “for the discussion of the budget. 
Gentlemen, there was a time, I should say a Golden 
Age, when the administrative power made it their 
chief delight to feed us well. And such was the 
generosity of the committee in those days, accord- 
ing to the traditions that have been handed down 
to us, that a surgeon might have started an eating- 
house with what the committee provided for him. 
Obliged now to find our own food, we chose from 


PBOFESSIONAL CBITICISM. 


81 


among us a treasurer who seemed worthy of our 
confidence. . . ” 

“Now hear me!” cried Pichenat. 

“ It is to the conduct of this responsible individual 
in whom we placed entire confidence, and who 
shamefully pockets perquisites. . . ” 

“Hear, hear!” 

“ . . . that I wish to call your attention. Pichenat 
—I name him, gentlemen — is always taking cabs ; 
it is true, he allows me to share them, but he pays 
for them. I saw him to-day holding a confab with 
his bootmaker, and paying his bill! . . 

“ Quite the contrary,” said Pichenat. 

“Gentlemen, he talks of taking a box at the 
opera. . . One word, gentlemen, in conclusion. 
At Bicetre we lived for twenty-five francs a month ; 
Pichenat dares to ask us eighty.” 

“Why did you appoint me treasurer?” 

“So that you should treasure up, to be sure.” 

“Malivoire, you are kicking over my brandied 
coffee !” 

“Down with you, Malivoire!” 

“Is there any ink here? . . . and a pen of any 
kind?” asked the doctor. And he began to write at 
the end of the table dedications on copies of his 
essay. “ By the way, does any one want a well- 
prepared heart? Who would like to have it?” 
would suit me; Vll take it.” 

“You have a fresh novice in the Sainte Therese 
ward?” 


82 


PBOFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 


^‘Haven’t you seen her?” 

“No, and don’t care to. At the hospital I was in 
last year they had the Sisters of Sainte Marthe.” 

“Ah, to be sure — Jansenist sisters.” 

“Don’t talk to me about your Jansenist sisters! 
They are all marked with small-pox.” 

“And the youngest knew our professors when 
they were students.” 

“What is the name of our novice? They have 
names; I don’t know where they fish them up 
from. . .” 

“Is not her name Sister Ambroisine?” 

“No, Sister Philomene.” 

“She is very pretty.” 

“And, besides, she seems a good sort of creature. 
She does not pull a face as long as your arm. . 

“ The nose in that face might, however, be smaller 
with advantage. ...” 

“Yes; but she has blue eyes and a soft glance.” 

“Is it a z or an r at the end of Metivier?” inquired 
the doctor, still writing. 

“A z.” 

“ The best of her is that she is graceful. . . , She 
does not move awkwardly. ...” 

“As for me, I don’t know what she has or she has 
not, but she seems to me charming. What do you 
say about her, Barnier?” 

“ Ah ! to to be sure, she is in the Sainte Therese 
ward; it is Barnier she works under. Well, Bar- 
nier?” 


PROFESSIONAL CRITICISM. 


83 


My dear fellow, as to me, . . . what would you 
have me say ? ... I do not like these young sisters 
on principle. I have a horror of romance. . . I 
hate little girls who take it into their heads to be- 
come nuns, without knowing why or wherefore . . . 
just a romantic idea, just as they might take a 
fancy to some cousin who came home for the vaca- 
tion. . . . The old ones, whose heart and hand do 
not tremble — they are the right sort.” 

“But come, old fellow, they must make a begin- 
ning.” 

-"“True, but I can’t help feeling so. Only yester- 
day evening she wanted to help me with a dressing. 
I was afraid she might turn faint, as she did the 
other day, and I could not refrain from snubbing 
her.” 


84 


AGREEABLY SURPRISED. 


CHAPTER IV. 

AGREEABLY SURPRISED. 

Sister Philomene had entered on her hospital 
work with a feeling of the deepest emotion. She 
had thought and pondered over it, hoping to be- 
come familiarized with the idea ; but it had, never- 
theless, haunted and filled her soul with terror. 
Day by day she felt weaker and less able to struggle 
against her apprehensions, against the poignant 
images conjured up by the mere sight of a great 
hospital wall pierced with its small windows. Her 
imagination, working in the dark, exaggerated the 
horrors concealed behind. She anticipated some- 
thing like the colored anatomical plates she had as 
a child caught sight of somewhere in the students’ 
Quartier Latin. And the very vagueness of it all 
created for her a hideous fiction. 

Her temples throbbed and her cheeks fiushed 
when for the first time she entered the ward con- 
fided to her charge. The very pokers she saw on 
the stoves she took for cauterizing irons. She 
fancied she was going to see morsels of fiesh, 
hideous stains on sharp steel instruments — all the 
dread paraphernalia of surgery at it horrible work. 

Instead of these horrors, she saw rows of white 
beds, white curtains— white linen everywhere — the 
pleasing air of fresh cleanliness of a young girl’s 


AGREEABLY SURPRISED. 


85 


bedroom. The polished floors shone. The patients 
rested peacefully on their pillows. The rosy tint 
of a fine autumn day lit up the transparent white- 
ness of the beds. Streaks of light played upon the 
bright copper dishes and the tin cans and basins, 
and the laughter of the house surgeons, the murmur 
of the convalescents’ chatter gave everywhere note 
of youth and cheerfulness. The whole ward was 
pervaded with so much brightness, peace, and 
order; so clever a vail was thrown over the misery 
and filth of disease, over the martyrdom of the 
wretched sufferers; horror was so well clothed, 
suffering was so calm, and agony so noiseless, that 
the sister, to her surprise, was calmed and reas- 
sured by the reality she dreaded. She was not only 
relieved, but filled with confidence and joy, freed at 
last from the terrors of her imagination, and proud 
to feel stronger than she had ever hoped to be. 

She dreaded above all the sight of death, and she 
now found herself in presence of it. A man had 
just died, his stretched-out hands lay flat on the 
bed. A brown knitted vest barely covered his 
chest ; his body was raised on a couple of pillows ; 
his head, thrown back and slightly turned on one 
side, displayed a thick black beard, pinched nostrils, 
and hollowed eyes. ■ His hair clung moist and 
damp round his head, and his mouth was wide 
open, as though departing life had forced the lips 
apart in the last supreme expiration. He lay there, 
still warm, yet wrapped and stiffened in the invisible 


86 


AQBEEABLT SUBPBISED. 


shroud of death. The sister remained a long time 
gazing at him, till she felt no more emotion before 
the corpse than would have stirred her at the sight 
of a waxen figure. 

For several days she maintained this firm 
courage, and it was with surprise and satisfaction 
that she ascertained how easily she overcame the 
weakness and cowardice of her nature. She had be- 
gun to think herself properly inured when, one 
evening, looking, at the wan, pallid face of a sleep- 
ing patient, her heart failed her, and she had to 
catch hold of the bed-post to avoid fallingj^ Until 
then, by her power of will and by diligent absorp- 
tion in her duties, she had escaped the impression 
and shock of all she saw around her. But the time 
had come when all this emotion unwittingly ac- 
cumulated within her must burst forth, and she 
broke down under the strain of the constant shocks 
that had passed unheeded at the time. (Her nerves, 
wrung by the spectacle of the hospital ever before 
her eyes, became unstrung, fevered, and irritated, 
and noises— such, even, as a tin cup falling — would 
send a painful thrill through every fiber. 

Every day revealed to her more vividly the things 
that the hospital conceals so admirably from view 
at first sight. The students’ heads bending over 
a sick-bed were not so close together that her eye 
could not glance between them and catch sight of 
some raw, bleeding wound. Death at all hours 
crossed her path, in that ghastly brown box that 


AGREEABLY SURPRISED. 


87 


hid the corpse, adding a mysterious terror to the 
horror of death. Things of which the meaning at 
first escaped her now assumed a new significance 
as she passed them. Mere sights called up some 
painful recollection that frightened her, some image 
that pained her, saturated as they were with the 
sufferings she had tended ; and when she beheld 
the wooden stretcher standing empty in the ante- 
room, her fancy peopled it again with the pale wo- 
men carried off upon it to the operating room, and 
brought back paler still. Her very marrow was 
chilled and her legs trembled under her at the 
images thus evoked.-^ 

At the top of the wide stairs she so often went 
up and down on her way to the Sainte Therese 
ward there was a big landing, and on that landing 
a wall that she had to pass. When her gown 
brushed against it she was seized with terror, like 
a child in the dark. ^Nevertheless, it was a wall 
like any other, a wall devoid even of those dark 
stains to be seen on many another hospital wall, 
,Hiat a bloody hand leaves on its passage — but be- 
hind it the sister right well knew was the dissect- 
ing-room. 


PBATINQ IN VAIN, 


CHAPTER V. 

PRAYING IN VAIN. 

The hospital, the wards, the beds soon became 
for her like that wall ; what her eyes saw not her 
mind seemed to see. Her imagination carried her 
behind every curtain, near each suffering bed ; it 
was indeed, a kind of abominable second sight that 
nothing could arrest. Often under the harrowing 
torture of these ceaseless perceptions tears rose to 
her eyes, tears that she repressed at the moment, 
but which welled up again a minute later. Every 
day scenes, the most ordinary incidents of hospital 
life, sounds and sights that had nothing dramatic 
about them, threw her suddenly into a half -fainting 
condition. A trifle was enough to bring tears to 
her eyes and make her falter in this ultra-sensitive 
state. Utterly discouraged and unable to restrain 
her feelings, it was as the last drop that makes the 
vase overflow.' 

. -^he was as much worn out by these emotions as a 
gambler by a long night of play. It seemed to her 
that her very reasoning gave way, and her physical 
power was so crushed down that there were mo- 
ments when she could have screamed out, ‘^Enough, 
enough for to-day !” But she immediately walked, 
and moved about ; bestirring herself unnecessarily, 


PRAYING IN VAIN. 


89 


fulfilling some duty she need not have performed ; 
and thus reconquering possession of her senses, 
compelled them to obey and serve her. 

^ ^ In the evening when not on duty as night nurse 
at the hospital, she returned to the community with 
her mind a blank, incapable of thought or energy. 
She could hardly follow the meaning of her prayers, 
or even remember the familiar words. The only 
ideas that came to her mind were mechanical — a 
weariness, some repetition of her physical impres- 
sions. They were not recollections but images 
that passed before her, to which she abandoned 
herself in a passive contemplation ; images which, 
by a strange illusion, mercilessly brought before 
her eyes the living reality. In vain she praj^ed in 
order to forget; but the odor, the insupportable 
odor, that clung to her clothes and the very pores of 
her skin, would not be forgotten. The hospital was 
no longer a vision ; she was in it once more^-^-^ 
Long did she maintain the struggle, trying to 
overcome her repugnances, offering her sufferings 
to God, and imploring Him to grant her the courage 
to be faithful in perseverance^^^ 


90 


TEE Moamm MimsTUATiom. 


CHAPTER VI. 

THE MORNING MINISTRATIONS. 

There is a certain hour in the morning — about ten 
o’clock — when the movement caused by the 
attendants, the animation of the patients, throws 
into a hospital a certain brightness, almost gayety. 
It is like a sort of respite in the day’s suffering. The 
doctors’ rounds and the dressing of wounds are 
over ; the approach of the doctor has brought a lit- 
tle hope to each bed ; the skillful hand of the house- 
surgeon has brought to the sufferer the relief of a 
fresh bandage and ointment. Bodies as well as 
hearts have been comforted. The stained linen has 
been carried off in a great sheet by the under- 
nurse; the floors have been polished, the pillows 
shaken up; the heads lie restfully; the faces, 
peaceful, smiling, and half-resuscitated, wea^ an 
expression of calm hopefulness, and even some 
touch of dainty cheerfulnessT^At the head of the 
beds the most convalescent of the patients are dress- 
ing, seated sideways on their chairs, half-turning 
toward the windows, happy and tired at first get- 
ting up, slowly lingering over their toilet, absent- 
minded and gazing vacantly around them.^ 

^ Then a large basketful of golden loaves cut up 


THE MOBNING MINISTBATI0N8. 


91 


in four pieces makes its appearance, and the little 
truck with the breakfast for the ward laid out on a 
white napkin. 

" First Sister Philomene distributed the broth. 
Quickly-, with rapid steps, she went from one bed to 
the other,bearing in front of her the tin bowl, the 
fumes of which smoked in her face. In a second 
she was at the head of the bed by the side of the 
patient. To some she handed the bowl of broth ; 
others she fed herself, supporting them while they 
raised themselves laboriously to drink while she 
held the bowls to their tremblng lips. After the 
broth came the bread, which she distributed more 
rapidly along, hurrying along with a vivacity 
which sent her vail flying behind her and her dress 
flapping against the curtains ; swiftly she passed, 
now at one bed, now at another. A convalescent 
patient, dressed in the gray hospital gown, fol- 
lowed her, carrying the loaves in a great linen 
table-cloth, which was tied round her neck while 
she held out one end. At each bed she opened the 
cloth to the sister, who took the piece of bread for 
the patient and placed it at the foot of the bed on 
the counterpane. (fThen came the wine, which 
another convalescent patient handed to her in a 
wooden pail ; at each bed the sister plunged a small 
measure in the pail, and once, twice, or thrice 
poured it into a mug, consulting all the while a 
sheet of paper pinned to her sleeve, on which were 
written the portions for each patient. To the very 


92 THE MOBNINO MINIBTRATIOES. 

end of the ward the clink of the metal followed her 
steps as she replaced the mug on each table. 

After the wine, the sister busied herself distribut- 
ing to those who were not yet well enough to be 
put on ordinary fare the more delicate food pro- 
vided for them — chicken, chops, and jam. The 
under-nurse, or some invalid patient able to get 
about, assisted her in this service ; and she herself 
pushed and dragged along the little rolling truck 
that carried to the foot of the beds, but only stopped 
at a few, the great saucepanful of rice milk, the 
earthen dish of stewed plums, the tiny portions of 
boiled meat on the big tin dish. 

The whole time the distribution was taking place, 
Philomene was animated with joyous activity. 
Some winged force seemed to endow her with 
graceful sprightliness; and she, beautiful in the 
very kindliness of her heart, with her sleeve tucked 
up to free her white hand, went to and fro, softly 
joked about the patients’ appetite, laughed at their 
hunger, promised this one to recommend her for an 
extra portion ; that one, if she was very good, to 
give her some tidbit the next day, thinking of 
everything, and sweeping off with her finger as she 
talked any crumb of bread that had slipped be- 
tween the sheets. 

This was indeed for Sister Philomene the happiest 
hour of the day. She forgot herself, she acquired 
fresh strength in the pleasure and joy of this sweet 
fatigue. She found in this duty the forgetfulness 


THE MORNING MINISTRATIONS. 


93 


of all that was ugly, repugnant, and terrible around 
her. ^And this morning’s work so filled her heart 
that she often gained in it sufficient courage for 
the remainder of the day?) 


94 


A FIRM SERENITY. 


CHAPTER VII. 

A FIRM SERENITY. 

' To add to the strength she derived from the 
pleasantness of her morning’s work she soon dis- 
covered other and purer sources of strength, ever 
abundantly and providentially renewed by the 
graces inherent in the work itself. These were 
nothing more than a blessed illusion of her own 
heart — the illusion that sustains in the beginning 
of a hospital’s repugnant novitiate both house-sur- 
geons and sisters. The sister had faith in her 
power against death, in her power to do a great 
deal for the health of her patients ; she had the 
credulous and generous confidence, the grand in- 
toxication of charity, that God gives to all who 
approach disease, to enable them to attain without 
faltering the force acquired by habit. Sister Philo- 
mene firmly believed that suffering could not resist 
her care, her vigilance, her ceaseless attentions, 
the effort of her every thought, the will of her whole 
being. She hoped to perform miracles, by giving 
her life to the sick, watching even their sleep, call- 
ing the attention of house-surgeon and doctor to 
the most incidental detail of their disease, testing 
the medicines and distributing them herself ; in a 
word, making their recovery the one thought and oc- 


A FIRM SERENITY. 


95 


cupation of every moment of her time. She fancied 
also she could wrest them from suffering by her 
watchful tenderness ; she should console and smile 
on them, snatch them from despair, raise them up 
to hope ; she should be a sister at their bedside, a 
mother at the lonely death -bed of the homeless and 
forsaken ; death should be powerless to snatch the 
living from her protecting arms. 

(^Alas! time and reality were to show her the 
vanity of her dream". ;^he sister found that the 
limits of life and death were beyond human power. 

(Jhe saw that the supreme hour was inexorable, and 
that neither prayer nor watchfulness had power to 
force or propitiate nature^ And though her work 
of devotion was not diminished in her eyes, yet her 
mission appeared to her far more humble and 
modest, limited to the mere alleviation of human 
suffering. Moreover, when the disappointment 
came, when the truth became known to her after 
months of anxiety and struggle, the process of 
inurement was accomplished ; she no longer needed 
the support of an illusion to tread firmly the path of 
duty whch she had traced out for herself. The 
ardor, the impulsiveness, the nervous irritability of 
her sensitive nature had been used up in the zeal of 
her first efforts, fbisease and death had now be- 
come habitual ; they could no longer make her eye 
shrink or her hand falterT^ All that remained in 
her of woman she felt was vanquished and subdued 
by the Sister of Charity ; and clothed in strength 


96 


A FIBM SERENITY. 


with her nun’s dress as with an armor, she threw 
herself on her knees in the little glazed cell at the 
end of the ward, where she remained when not 
wanted, and thanked God in a burst of joy.-S^ 

. From this moment she was possessed of a firm 
serenity which habit could not harden?^ Her un- 
alterable gentleness never became indifferent; it 
remained tender. Her patients delighted in her 
attendance because her face always wore an ex- 
pression of interest and real compassion for them. 
They loved her for the look she gave them, for the 
voice that spoke so softly. They loved her because 
a tremor of emotion still lingered in the care she 
bestowed on them. ') 


ACqUIlUNG COURAGE. 


97 


CHAPTER VIII. 

ACQUIRING COURAGE. 

“ What ! had you really such difficulty in p^etting 
accustomed to hospital work? You, a surgeon — a 
man ?” 

‘‘Yes, indeed; people fancy that it costs us noth- 
ing. Well, you will hardly believe it, sister — and 
I am not the only one — for more than a year after 
I began hospital work I was depressed and sad- 
dened, dreadfully saddened, by all I saw ; and it 
was quite six months before I could eat my dinner 
in comfort” 

“ Ah ! I am glad to hear you say that. I felt so 
ashamed of myself at first.” 

And then it is much worse for us than for you. 
The first experience in the dissecting-room is 
awfully trying. It gives one such a turn. And 
the post-mortem examinations! The loathsome, 
disgusting smell that clings to one — fortunately, 
there is plenty of mustard-seed to wash with. Oh ! 
it is hard work at first, for every one. This morn- 
ing, for instance, we had such a scene. As we had 
made rather a row the other day in the lecture hall, 
we fancied a spy had slipped in during the doc- 
tor’s rounds, a very dapper, neat young fellow, 
with a little black mustache. So we pushed him 


98 


ACqUlRING COURAGE. 


up against a bed in which there was a small-pox 
patient — and down he fainted. We at once cried 
out, “That’s one of them.” 

The house-surgeon, Barnier, who attended to the 
Sainte Therese ward, was talking with Sister 
Philomene. The sister listened and watched him 
as he stood in the shadow of the open door, leaning 
against the wall. She stood in the middle of his 
study like a luminous figure ; a fiood of light came 
through the big window and cast a dazzling sheen 
over her white costume. From all sides of the 
room, through the window-panes and curtains, the 
sun poured in upon her and bathed her in its rays ; 
and in the brilliancy that surrounded and spread 
over her, her face, softened by the transparency of 
her coif and vail, seemed encircled with a shining 
halo. I^Her complexion had the transfigured pallor 
that the cloister life gives to nuns, the divine and 
virginal light that brings to mind the glory of a 
resuscitated being; and her countenance was 
radiant with spiritual beauty.*^ 

“You lend me courage,” she went on, after a mo- 
ment’s silence ; and rousing herself from her 
thoughts, she added, “Ah, you are looking at the 
book I am reading — I wanted to ask you about it. 
There are many things you must explain to me.” 

“Very well, sister; it is the “Manual,” I see. I 
am quite at your service.” 

“ The fact is, I want to know — one ought to learn 
a little about medicines if one wants to be of use. 


ACqUIRING COURAGE. 


99 


Oh ! I don’t intend to be turned away again like 
that other day — you remember — when you took the 
bandage out of my hands.” 

“Was I really so rough?” 

“ Why do you ask?” 

“Because I see you are still vexed with me.” 

.^“ No, I am not, or I should not speak about it. 
You were nervous on my account, I know. But 
now I am brave; I have prayed so ardently that 
strength has been given me. Put me to the test and 
you will see.”v 


100 


A EABD 0AM. 


CHAPTER IX. 


A HARD CASE. 


This great victory, this mastery over herself, was 
not at first absolute, nor without relapse. From 
time to time she was again surprised by the in- 
stinctive feelings, and the shock of impressions she 
fancied she had freed herself from, and she still 
experienced some final emotions that gave her a 
parting pang. 

One morning as she went down to the linen- 
closet, she saw the house-surgeon enter the consult- 
ing-room, and remembering that she wanted to ask 
him what dose of quinine she must give a patient, 
she thought she would go and inquire at once, in- 
stead of sending for him. She therefore crossed 
the snow-covered yard, following the black track 
of footsteps by the side of the half-thawed gutter — 
a narrow pathway that led to the steps of the room 
—and she entered the surgery. 

In the raw light of the curtainless window, over 
the wooden barrier placed to divide the files of out- 
patients, an old man was at that moment exhibiting 
to the surgeon a large swelling on his miserably 
emaciated wrist. He was a poor old man, shriveled 
up by the cold, in a threadbare coat with its collar 
turned up. A few long, straggling white hairs 



A IIABB CASM 


101 


clung to his bony face, and his sunken eyes seemed 
lifeless. He stood there, bent and humble, holding 
his hat in his shaking hand. He himself shook like 
some old dead tree tottering under a wintry blast. 
Barnier looked at the sick man’s wrist. 

“Do you cough?” he inquired, without raising 
his eyes. 

“Yes, sir, a great deal,” answered the old man 
in a voice scarcely audible, so faint and doleful 
was it, “but it’s my wrist that pains me.” 

“Yes — I see — but we cannot take you in. You 
must go to the parvis Notre Dame.” 

The old man did not reply, but merely gazed at 
the surgeon. “And ask for some physic — not any 
operation, only physic,” the surgeon repeated, as 
the man seemed not to hear. 

“But it’s here it hurts,” persisted the old man in 
his dull, feeble voice, still displaying his wrist. 

“ They will cure you of that, do you understand, in 
curing your cough.” 

X “To the parvis Notre Dame,” shouted almost in 
the old man’s ear a gruff voice from between a 
thick pair of mustaches, those of the hospital por- 
ter, who stood with his hands behind his back, 
swelling his voice so as not to give way to emotion. 
The snow was falling fast and its heavy flakes 
could be seen through the window. The old man 
went off without a word, with his hat still trem- 
bling in his shaky hand. 

“Poor devil! what weather! And it’s a good 


102 


A BAUD CASE. 


distance,” said the porter, looking at the snow. 
“He will not probably live five days.” 

/^The surgeon had turned to a young man near 
him; “Yes,” he said, “it is a hard case. But if I 
had admitted him, my chief would have sent him 
away to-morrow; it is very difficult to know what 
to do with such poor creatures ; it is what we call 
in hospital slang une pair ague.* If we admitted 
all those who are consumptive — Paris wears out 
so many ! — we should have no room for the others, 
those that can be cured.” And, .seeing the sister 
waiting to speak to him, “Do you want anything, 
sister?” 

“I can’t remember,” stammered the sister, and 
she hurried away. 


Broken down. 


EXPBESSIONS OF GRATITUDE. 


103 



EXPRESSIONS OF GRATITUDE. 


‘‘Madame Number One!” 

“Madame Number Six!” 

“Madame Number Eleven! Just listen for a mo- 
ment.” 

The patients in Sainte Therese ward were call- 
ing each other by the numbers of their beds, talk- 
ing and gossiping from one bed to another. Almost 
all were in bed ; only seven or eight, who were get- 
ting up for the first time, were seated on chairs by 


CHAPTER X. 


104 


EXPBESISIONS OF OEATITUDE. 


their bedside. Some were slowly pacing up and 
down the ward. One of them sitting at the end of 
the big table, was writing under the dictation of 
another, with elbows outstretched and body bent 
in her unaccustomed effort. The house-surgeon 
was finishing his afternoon rounds. 

And from one bed to the other they exchanged 
questions. 

“Do you expect anybody to-morrow?” 

“To-morrow — ah! yes, Thursday — I don’t know.” 

“I expect three visitors — no four,” said a woman, 
counting on her fingers. “You did not see my hus- 
band last time, did you?” 

“Yes, I saw him; do you think I could sleep with 
such a weight as this on my body?” 

“And you?” 

“Oh! as for me, my husband and children would 
have to travel two hundred miles ” 

“What, you live so far off?” 

Yes, indeed, thank God, I don’t belong to your 
Paris! If I was the only person to live in it, it 
would be empty enough. Not even a tree before 
the churches ! For those who have their relations 
here it's all very well, but for the others, they’ve 
only the hospital; and they are cheerful places! 
Ain’t it ugly here? I am sure I shall be quite 
melancholy for a fortnight after I have got home.” 

“Is it a pretty country where you live?” 

— “ I should think it was. Suppose this is the 
principal street. Well, we live there. You enter 


EXPRESSIONS OF GRATITUDE. 


105 


into the best room. Oh ! what work I shall have to 
clean it all up! You know what men are. And 
then there are two rooms at the back, and the gar- 
den. On the left hand in the garden is the shed 
where the father and lads work at their knives. 
They do cutlery work, and of the best, which they 
sell to a shop in the Kue Richelieu ; they work like 
niggers! Well, there’s the garden, in which we 
have a winter pear tree so loaded with fruit that a 
lot are lost ; then at the farther end, the river runs 
by — such clear water! So that one has only a few 
steps to go to wash one’s linen.” 

‘‘I say, Madame Number Nine, were you already 
in the hospital when that rag-picker’s wife was 
here?” 

‘‘No.” 

/^‘Well, fancy; the poor thing’s agony began 
Sunday morning ; her husband came to see her in 
the afternoon— a horrid man, who spent his days 
drinking, and had drank her out of house and 
home. She had saved a little money that she had 
tied up in her chemise. That blackguard, under pre- 
tence of kissing her, tried to get hold of it. She 
called out, ‘Thief, thief!’ It made such a commo- 
tion in the ward.” 

The surgeon had reached the last beds. As he 
passed by one of them he gently scratched the 
counterpane at the foot of it. 

“I am no longer ticklish. Monsieur Barnier,” said 
/Almost gayly the woman who had had her leg cut 


106 


EXPEESSIONS OF GRATITUDE. 


off, and after a moment^s silence, she added, an- 
swering a neighbor : 

‘‘ It is a fact there are bad men, but there are also 
good men. There’s Monsieur Barnier, for instance, 
who is so gentle and so kind to the sick. Has not 
the half-hour struck yet? I wonder if the sister is 
not going to make her orange round to-day. It 
would refresh me a bit.” 

“The sister? Yes, there she is — she is coming 
out of her box.” 

^—Bister Philomene had just come out of her den ; 
she was peeling an orange as she walked along, 
holding it out at arm’s length so as not to stain her 
dress. When she had taken off the peel she slowly 
divided it, and going up to the bedsides distributed 
the transparent pieces into the open mouths of the 
women, eager as little children. At the mention of 
Barnier’ s name his praises rang through the ward. 
Gratitude and blessings were loudly spoken. 

“Yes,” said one, “a kind, good fellow, who shows 
no reluctance about his work. ...” 

“Ah! indeed he knows how to dress wounds! 
And he uses warm water first, so that it does not 
hurt at all.” 

“He came to our place to doctor my man, and 
certainly it was not for what we could pay him.” 

.^--N^All these voices re-echoing his praises sounded 
softly in Sister Philomene’s ears. Her step was 
not slower, but she felt an involuntary sympathy 


EXPBESSIOm OF GHATITUDE 


107 


for the women who spoke like this— almost, indeed, 
a kind of gratitude. 

‘‘Here are my paper bags finished. I hope they’ll 
be pleased with them in the dispensary I” said a wo- 
man sitting up in bed to one lying down, with a 
big cat snoozing quietly at her feet. “ Ah ! to-mor- 
row — to-morrow!” and she again repeated, “to-mor- 
row!” in a humming voice. “I shall try to have 
my certificate to-day so as to get out early to-mor- 
row and see again my little home. How happy I 
am ! When your turn comes, my dear, you’ll see ; 
however weak your legs are, they feel quite strong 
enough to take you off home ! Still it is hard to 
leave one’s companions. We ought all to go out 
on the same day.” 

“ Oh, as for me, I don’t mind staying behind ; I 
don’t suffer any more now. And, you see, it’s 
everything not to suffer, when one has had such 
awful pain as I have. And then I got a woman 
I know to tell my fortune in coffee-grounds, and 
she saw me all right again on my two legs in a few 
months— and it’s a woman who has foretold me 
everything that has happened. I can still work, 
that is something; one need never be dull.” 

“That’s very fine, I say, that embroidery of 
yours; for some princess, eh?” 

“I’ll tell you,” said the invalid, after looking to 
/^ee if Sister Philomene was near. “ It’s for a present 
—to trim a petticoat. As I’ve been here six months 
and Monsieur Barnier has nursed me well, I thought 


108 


EXFRESSIOJSS OF GRATITUDE. 


I’d just offer him a little remembrnce. He is too 
nice a young man not to have a sweetheart, and 
this will trim up a petticoat for her ; it will look 
pretty in dancing ” 

‘‘Will you stop talking? You will be having fever 
here,” said Sister Philomene, almost sternly, coming 
back on her step.. -v 


mcSSSABT QUALITIES. 


109 


CHAPTER XI. 

NECESSARY QUALITIES. 

^ many things, so many duties, so much re- 
sponsibility is left, by the hospital regulations, to 
the discretion, good will, and zeal of the sisters 
that the sister who has charge of a ward is either 
all-powerful or a nonentity. She is a nonentity if 
she lack intuition and energy; if she lack the spirit 
and youthful enthusiasm of self-devotion. How- 
ever commendable she may be by her piety and 
meritorious qualities, she is nothing if she have not 
the true vocation that instinctively teaches her how 
to devote herself both hand and soul to the task of 
alleviating pain, that fever of charity which is a 
“divine anxiety of mind and body. <"She is nothing 
if she possess not a certain delicacy of feeling 
which enables her to ease the hearts of those who 
suffer; if she be deficient in a certain maternal 
authority by which she enters into the wants, ideas, 
and confidences of the man or woman of the people.") 
Or if, again, she be not endowed with the natural 
gifts that predestine her for her part, if she be 
wanting in health or physical strength, or if her 
face be not one of those amiable, smiling counte-— 
nances that the sick like to see at their bedside — 


110 


NECESSARY qUALITIES. 


then the sister is nothing more than an under nurse, 
more gentle than other underlings, (if, however, 
the sister has some of these qualities, if she is 
active and sympathetic, ever eager in her work ; if 
she widens, according to the capacity of her heart, 
the narrow circle of her occupations ; if she strives 
to make her task as noble as her sacrifice — in fine, 
if she is really a sister of charity — she is everything, 
does everything, and is all-powerful in the ward) 
The sisters’ absolute duties consist in receiving, 
verifying, and administering the medicines brought 
by the dispensary assistant; in distributing the 
food, more especially the wine, and in seeing that 
it shall not be drunk by the attendants or ward- 
maids: in giving out the linen, sharing with the un- 
derlings the nursing duties — in fact exercising a 
general supervision over the ward. But these 
duties, vague and extensible by the very dryness 
and narrowness of their terms, place in her hands, 
if she chooses to use them freely, the governing* 
power of the ward. Thus, with the distribution of 
the food and wine, there are also the grants of 
tickets for extra wine, fish, or jam, delicacies 
given to the convalescents and to tempt the invalids’ 
returning appetites, which the sister can always 
obtain from the doctor if she knows how to ask. 
Her strict duties are confined to the administering 
of the physic and nursing the sick, but she is free 
to be something more than nurse. By patiently 
and carefully scrutinizing the patient, by experience 


NECESSARY QUALITIES. 


Ill 


and an elementary study of medicine, she can as- 
sist the doctors’ observations, send in time for the 
house-surgeon, and tend the patient with a certain 
knowledge of his illness. Besides the management 
of the ward, a control confined to a mere supervision 
of its cleanliness and order, she has also, if she 
chooses, a moral control to exercise. Is it not her 
duty to note down the convalescents who trade with 
their bread, to listen to the invalids’ complaints, to 
see that these complaints reach the officers, to de- 
nounce and obtain the dismissal of any attendants 
or under-nurses who exact remuneration for atten- 
tions they are bound to bestow? 

And over and above these functions and this in- 
fluence, is it not the sisters’ duty and in her power 
to control the sick? She has charge of these suf- 
fering beings ; she must bring hope to these tran- 
sient but ever-filled sick-beds, wherein the dead 
have scarcely time to grow cold ! 

^-^And what part is there more grand, more noble 
than this ; to bring back the sick to God, to vail 
from them their empty, poverty-stricken hearts, to 
point out a future to this one, heaven to another, to 
join two prayerful hands over those for whom none 
prays ; to wrest those about to die from the hor- 
rible dreams of the dissecting-room, to lull them to 
sleep in God’s arms.'-v^ 

In the ward where she had been placed under the 
direction of an estimable and devoted Mother, 
whose zeal, however, was somewhat cooled down, 


112 


NECESSARY QUALITIES. 


tempered by habit and old age, the young woman 
won both doctor and students by the warmth of 
her zeal, and soon rose and attained the fullest 
authority of a hospital sister. Free and mistress 
of her own actions under this superior, devoid of 
jealousy, and happy to have her duties lightened, 
she daily extended and increased her power of 
kindliness and compassionate influence. 

^She was the mediatrix through whom all that 
was hard in the hospital rule/was softened ; hers the 
gentle and compassionate hand the sufferers craved 
for, the soothing, happy voice that lent courage 
to the convalescents. She was the watchful and 
controlling power who enforced a humane and con- 
scientious service round the sick-beds. She was 
almost a family for the sick, so well did she enter 
into their affections as a confidante, share their 
thoughts as a relative, their tears like a friend.^ She 
could be seen constantly passing from bed to bed, 
never empty-handed, a tender glance in her eyes ; 
going to and fro, from the dispensary to the ward, 
from the ward to her little room, counting, check- 
ing, verifying, bending over the consulting-books, 
never taking a moment’s rest.) Her gown flitted 
backwards and forwards, ever on the move. 

'^he was indeed venerated and beloved. The 
' patients who had been in the ward for some time 
talked to the new-comers of their good luck and the 
kind sister who would attend to them. Even in the 
other wards they looked out for the nights she 


NECESSARY QUALITIES. 


113 


would be on duty ; in the evening, from one bed to 
another, they spoke of her rounds ; and when in 
the day-time she came down the stairs, the convales- 
cents, who on the men’s landing smoked their pipes 
as they hobbled about on crutches, saluted her with 
a pull at their cotton night-caps.X Her reputation 
was a kind of popularity ; her name was frequently 
mentioned at the students’ dinners ; some spoke en- 
thusiastically of her charming manners ; in others 
curiosity was excited at the bottom of their hearts, 
doctors and students alike took a certain pride in 
this admriable sister, the novice of Sainte Therese 
ward.^ 


'GOD WILL REWABB YOU: 


lU 


CHAPTER XII. 

‘‘GOD WILL REWARD YOU.” 

/ — When in the hospital the patient — man or woman 
— is not a brutish creature, a kind of animal whom 
poverty has hardened and filled with enmity ; when 
he shows some of the feelings of human nature, and 
under the hand that tends him reveals some moral 
sentiments ; when his heart has received even the 
slightest education, he at once finds the doctors and 
students full of kindly attention. The sisters, 
too, obey the irresistible law of sympathy. They 
are involuntarily attracted where their tenderness 
will meet with the best reward, and where also they 
may hope, in their pious zeal, to find the greatest 
facility in propagating their religious ideas, and 
sowing thoughts of God in a soul. 

This affection for grateful and favorite patients 
sustained Sister Philomene’s courage; it made her 
strong and patient. Often she reproached herself 
for it ; she fancied, in her hours of stern self-exam- 
ination, that her preferences were unjust ; but as 
she felt no remorse, she concluded that God did not 
demand this sacrifice of her. 

Was not her whole life made up of these affec- 
tions created by her self-devotion, formed by the 


'OOD WILL BEWAUD YOU.' 


115 


bedside of the patients, ,and too often broken by 
death — abrupt separations that made her so sad? 
Was it not all her consolation, her love for these 
women whom she saw, after many long days and 
much suffering, start off one morning with the joy- 
ousness of renewed health, turn the handle of the 
door, and disappear, leaving with her a feeling of 
intense happiness, but also the pang of parting 
^Among her patients Sister Philomene had a young 
woman whom they had at first hoped to cure, and 
whose life was now despaired of. In her speech 
and attitude this woman — entered on the books as 
a seamstress, and who never spoke of her past — 
betrayed early traces of education, of fortune, and 
of a once happy life. A catastrophe could be sus- 
pected — one of those misfortunes that oblige unac- 
customed hands to work. The emotion of her 
thanks, her deep and subdued despair, and her 
resignation had interested every one, the surgeon, 
the students, and the other patients. Every day- 
taking advantage of the permission granted to the 
patients’ sons and daughters, a little boy, whom 
they soon found out lived in -a common lodging- 
house in the Rue de rHotel-de-Yille, came and sat 
by the poor woman’s bedside, and called her mother.--v> 
He was dressed in the old clothes of a better class, 
which he seemed to have grown up in, and grown 
out of. He sat on a tall chair, dangling his legs, 
with the unhappy expression of a child longing to 
cry, looking at his mother, who, too weak to talk to 


116 


■•^GOD WILL REWARD YOU. 


him, devoured him with her eyes for a full hour, 
and then dismissed him. 

Sister Philomene took a fancy to the child ; every 
day she had some fruit or tidbit put aside for him 
as a surprise. She led him by the hand to her little 
room, and there talked to him, showed him religious 
picture-books, or gave him a pencil and seating him 
at her desk, let him scribble on blank tickets. 
Sometimes she would wash his face, part his hair, 
and bring him back clean and tidily combed to the 
sick-bed of his mother, who blessed her with a look 
such as she would have bestowed on the Holy Virgin 
if she had appeared to her holding her son’s handrv^- 

The woman was fading away. One day the child 
was seated by her side on a chair. He gazed at her 
almost terrified, seeking in vain his mother in the 
face he no longer recognized. The sister tried in 
vain to amuse and coax him. At the foot of the 
bed Barnier was putting mustard-plasters on the 
patient’s legs. And the woman, turned toward the 
sister, was saying in the slow, low, penetrating 
voice of one about to die : 

‘'No, sister, it is not . . . dying . . . that fright- - 
ens me. ... I am ready ... if it were only I . . . 
but he, my sister.” And she glanced at the child. 
“When I shall be no longer there ... so young a 
child . . . what will become of him?” 

“Come, come,” said Sister Philomene “jmu are 
going to recover ... we shall cure you, shall we 
not, Monsieur Barnier?” 


'GOD WILL BEWAliD YOU. 


117 


“Certainly ... we shall cure you, . . . ’’replied 
the house-surgeon, slowly and with difficulty bring- 
ing out his words. 

“Oh !” said the sick woman, with a broken-hearted 
smile, and half -closed eyes : “You cannot under- 
stand, sister, ... a poor child left all alone in the 
world. . . . He had but me.” 

“As a Christian you cannot doubt God’s goodness 
and mercy. . . . He will not abandon your child.” 

And from Sister Philomene’s lips rose an exhorta- 
tion, which became a prayer, and seemed to lift up 
and stretch wings out to God, over the bed of the 
dying woman and the poor little unhappy orphan. 

When the sister had finished, the patient remained 
silent for a time, and then she sighed : 

^‘Yes, sister, I know . . . but to leave him . . . 

without knowing; .... if I were only sure he 
woud have food . . . bread even ... if I only were 
certain he would have bread every day!” And the 
tears streamed from her eyes half-dimmed by death. 

Barnier, after putting on the mustard-plasters, 
had remained motionless at the bed-side turning his 
back on the woman ; his hands behind him played 
nervously with the iron post of the bedstead, when 
suddenly, carried away by one of those impulses 
that sometimes seize hold of the strongest,he turned 
round, and in a short, abrupt voice said to the dying 
woman : 

Well, if that is all you want, you may make 
your mind easy. ... I have a kind old mother who 


118 


'QOD WILL REWABD YOU: 


lives in the country. . . . She says the house seems 
too big now I have left. ... It is an easy matter ; 
your boy will keep her company. . . . And I can 
answer for it, she does not make children unhappy.” 

“Oh!” cried the woman, who seemed to revive for 
a moment, “God will reward you!”-'-'^ 

And she drew the child toward her in an ardent 
embrace, as though she wished, before giving him 
up to another woman, to fill his memory with his 
mother’s last kiss. 

Yes,” repeated the sister, looking at the surgeon 
—“yes, indeed, God will reward 


HYMN OF TEIXJMFE. 


119 


CHAPTER XIII. 

HYMN OF TRIUMPH. 

. Sister Philomene, now accustomed to the hospital, 
soon found her pleasure there, and in time this life, 
confined to the limits of a sick-ward, had for her a 
singular attraction. She became attached to this 
existence, to the place where she spent most of her 
days, where her heart had full play ; the spot famil- 
iar to her devotion, the narrow circle in which her 
occupations were centered. The world, its tidings 
and turmoil, were but a murmur that died out 
around her, that she no longer heard,., . 

^-These walls, beds, sick women, closed the horizon 
of her sight as well as the horizon of her mind ; she 
neither sought nor dreamed of anything beyond. 
And she found in the hospital ward the impression of 
rest and peace conveyed by the sight of the garden 
of a country parsonage losing itself among the 
tombs of the church-yard. 

. A peaceful calm dwelt in her. Her sacrifices, her 
labors, a life so full of work, had settled and 
strengthened her religious sentiments. Piety had 
now become part of her character ; she had found 
her crowning joy and recompense in the never- 
varying fervor to which she had attained, and 


120 


HYMN OF TRIUMPH. 


which the excited, feverish, and overstrained faith 
of her childhood and youth had so long and so 
vainly asked of God with the effort, excess, vio- 
lence, and impatience of human passion. She had 
no need to evoke the presence of God ; she felt as if 
it were near her. The fears, doubts, and bitterness 
of her early weakness had now disappeared; 
her countenance reflected a calm and placid spirit ; 
she enjoyed a full and undisputed possession of 
God^s grace, and drew from an inflnite divine love 
— like the inexhaustible source from which Saint 
Catherine filled her cup — the gifts of terrestrial be- 
atitude, Christian joy, cheerful and beaming hap- 
piness, the radiant kindliness that endows women 
with the gifts of angels.--'^. '' 

>-^The void within her was filled, all her being satis- 
fied. Her sensitiveness, formerly so prone to exalt- 
ation and ever ready to turn to love, her instinctive 
tenderness, so cruelly wounded by indifference and 
contempt, had found in the exercise of charity 
appeasement, satisfaction, and activity, a happiness 
that was almost voluptuous in its completeness. 
When, after having spent the day in dressing the 
wounds of the poor, in which her heart saw those of 
Christ, the sister, her task once ended, slowly 
returned to her cell and thought over the comfort 
her hands and words had given, the sufferings she 
had allayed, the hopes she had encouraged, the good 
she had been able to do, the lives she had cheered 
and death-beds she had consoled — it seemed to her 


ETMN OF miUMPH. 


121 


that she bore away with her the grateful look and 
the thankful words of all the sufferers; and there 
rose within her breast an ineffable joy, a joy that 
was not of the earth, earthy, a joy that resembled 
no human happiness or pleasure, a joy with which 
she felt her heart overflow within her, and which 
poured itself forth in a hymn of triumph, rv^ 


122 


EXACTING A PROMISE. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

EXACTING A PROMISE. 

The child adopted by Barnier’s mother — the brat, 
as Barnier called him— had become a link between 
the sister and house-surgeon, and a common interest 
that drew them together. Their thoughts met on 
the subject. “My mother writes me word . . . the 
brat sends a kiss, ...” Barnier would say, as he 
passed the sister in his morning rounds with the 
head physician. 

^ Then, after a time, they chatted about the boy ; 
the usual innocent jokes that make up the inter- 
course between sisters and resident doctors were 
followed up by short conversations, gay or serious, 
about the hospital or the patients. When the after- 
noon dressing was not too protracted and Barnier 
had time to spare, he went into the sister’s closet ; 
and there, seated on a chair near her wicker arm- 
chair, he often spent a quarter of an hour talking 
to her. The sister, full of her patients, asked him 
questions about the “Manual,” how such or such a 
medicine or draught should be administered, and 
nearly always drifted in the course of conversation 
into all that still remained to be done in hospitals 
to improve the usefulness of the charity, to arrive 


EXACTING A FROMISE. 


123 


at a more perfect realization of an ideal hospital. 
They exchanged their ideas on innovations and im- 
provements, and inspired by her theme, the sister 
intrusted the future to the hands of the house-sur- 
geon, when he should be a famous surgeon and 
should have a hospital under his charge. The air, 
that ought to be renewed oftener, was a great topic ; 
a different system of ventilation to be discovered, 
which, without letting in the cold, should carry off 
the impure air and bring in the fresh ; the pewter 
pots and pans which the sister considered inef- 
ficient to keep the broths and slops hot, which ought 
to be replaced by thick china, even with the chance 
of a little breakage ; then the dead, who might be 
removed in a less ostentatious manner, less pain- 
fully, than in that dreadful box — on a stretcher, 
for instance, like invalids taken away for an opera- 
tion ; and the attendants and under-nurses, whose 
pay of ten shillings a month ought to be 
raised if it were expected they should have 
some honesty, and should not seek to make money 
out of both living and dead, taking toll from the 
sick and robbing the corpses. In fact, there was 
no end to the reforms in management, customs, and 
rule that the sister and house-surgeon did not, in 
their Utopian zeal, dream of in their model hospital. 

One afternoon when they talked longer than 
usual on this matter, the sister said, as she got up : 
“ Monsieur Barnier, you must promise me one thing.” 

‘‘Speak, sister.” 


124 


EXACTING A PROMISE. 


— ^l,When you are become a famous surgeon” — Bar- 
nier smiled at the sister’s habitual exordium — “ I . . 
if I am still in this world . . . and I shall not have 
changed — I shall merely wear a black vail, that is 
all — and I shall still be in an hospital. . . . Well, 
no one knows . . . perchance ... I may find my- 
self again in a ward under your supervision. ... 1 
want you to promise that you will never refuse me 
any delicacies for my patients.” 

“If that is all,” replied Barnier, and he held up 
his hand, “ well, I swear I will ruin the hospitals in 
wings of chicken, wine, and fried whitings.” 


EXCHANGE OF THOUGHTS, 


125 


CHAPTER XV. 

EXCHANGE OF THOUGHTS. 

,/^These friendly chats, so pleasant to Philomene, 
these talks constantly renewed on endless pretexts, 
lengthened by degrees and assumed a tone of con- 
fidential intimacy. They soon became the sister’s 
principal distraction. They formed the one recrea- 
tion of her day, the unexpected event in the round 
of life ; they gave her a little of the outer air to 
breathe. In this exchange of thoughts which 
brightened her work, that attachment to self from 
which the hospital life had freed her reasserted its 
dominion. She freely permitted herself the dis- 
traction, ever fresh and new, of talking with the 
surgeon, who in speech led her to reveal her remem- 
brances, her ignorance, her curiosity, her imagina- 
tion on most subjects. 

In these conversations she displayed an ingenu- 
ousness that took from her all appearances of false 
modesty. She talked with the surgeon in a familiar, 
almost brotherly, manner. Sometimes, indeed, she 
asked him questions that were embarrassing in 
their very naivete. 

Words fell from her as they fall from the very 
lips of innocence. Absolutely pure in thought, she 


126 


EXCHANGE OF THOUGHTS. 


unbosomed herself in the most perfect serenity 
of conscience. She was, in fact, candor itself. 

^^^And not only had her speech the severity of vir- 
gin frankness ; charity brought her without distinc- 
tion to suffering men and women alike, and the 
daily practice of the devotion which trained her 
heart to a courage above that of her sex — the 
hospital, in short — set upon her lips that accent of 
virile liberty, that strangely masculine utterance, 
not without grace, peculiar to sisters of charity 


KEM1N18CENGES, 


127 


CHAPTER XVI. 

REMINISCENCES. 

/^ From hospital affairs, the conversation little by 
little had turned to things of the outer world; the 
sister asked Banner the news of the day, and in- 
quired about what was .going on in Paris, in the 
world of which she now heard nothing but the 
rumbling of the carriage-wheels that at night 
reached her cell. She asked what changes had 
taken place, what alterations in the Champs Ely- 
sees or Tuileries Gardens, her childhood’s recollec- 
tions — all that she vaguely remembered, as a blind 
person might inquire about her native town that 
she was never to see again. 

All that penetrated to her ears as a faint echo 
outside furnished a theme for her questions ; she 
asked about a new church that was being built, a 
military review, a fresh street laid out in a quarter 
she had known ; about a dinner party the house- 
surgeon had been to at his senior surgeon’s; about 
a murderer she had heard the patients talk about; 
about the masks on Shrove Tuesday— in fact, on 
every and the most diverse subects. The house- 
surgeon was very much amused by the sister’s 
curiosity, and her questioning like a child or a 
prisoner ; and speculating upon her credulity, he 


128 


BEMimSGEIiCES. 


sometimes made up such wonderful stories that he 
was himself obliged to laugh and stop short. 

‘‘Oh! how clever, is it not,” she would say, rather 
vexed, “to take in a person who knows nothing of 
what is going on!” 

In mentioning one day in the course of conversa- 
tion that he had gone up the Rue de la Chaussee 
d’Antin, she at once asked him if he had noticed 
about the middle of the street such and such a 
house, if the shop on the left still bore a certain 
name, if a stationer were yet next door to a china- 
shop. 

“Why, sister,” said Barnier, smiling, “do you sup- 
pose that I can remember all the houses of the 
streets I pass through?” 

“Ah! that’s true,” she answered, ingenuously; 
“but I fancy I see it all.” 

“Oh! if you care about it, I promise to look next 
Wednesday, when I shall be that way again.” 

'-''^Ah, thank you; . . * will you remember the 
number? . . . You will see whether in the shop 
next door there is still a fat man with ridiculously 
short arms . . . and in the other a little girl— she 
must be a big girl now — she had red hair, so you 

would easily recognize her You must look 

up to the fourth story. ... I should cry if I were 
to see those windows again,” added the sister, as 
though she were talking to herself. “I was 
quite a small child then,” she resumed, addressing 
the house-surgeon after a pause. 


THE 8I8TEHS JE8T. 


129 


CHAPTER XVII. 

THE sister’s jest. 

Sometimes the surgeon was in a teasing mood 
On such days he amused himself by tormenting 
Sister Philomene on religion. He would argue, 
philosophize, dispute with mischievous persistency, 
but yet handle his subject with as light a touch as 
that with which a well-mannered man makes fun 
of the tastes of a young girl he honors or the con- 
victions of a woman he respects. He would press 
the sister, worry her by jesting in order to make 
her speak and reply to him. He would have liked 
to make her impatient; but the sister understood 
his maneuvers and guessed his intention from the 
smile that he could not conceal. She would allow 
him to talk, look at him, and then laugh. The sur- 
geon, with his most serious air, would renew his 
arguments, seeking for those that might most em- 
barrass the sister; trying, for example, to prove 
to her by scientific reasons the impossibility of such 
and such a miracle. The sister, undisturbed, re- 
plied by evading the question with a jest, a sally of 
natural mother wit and honest common sense, by 
one of those simple and happy phrases that faith 
puts into the mouths of the ignorant and the sim- 


130 


THE SISTER 8 JEST 


pie. One day, pushed to the far end, Barnier said 
to her : 

“ After all, sister, suppose heaven does not exist ; 
you will be famously sold.” 

‘‘Yes,” replied Sister Philomene, laughing, “but 
if it does, you will be much more sold than I.”-^ 


ONE'S DUTY. 


131 


CHAPTER XVIII. 
one’s duty. 

Well, I have been to see your invalid, sister; 
she will be about again in a week. I am a mes- 
senger of good news to-day ; there is not one case 
of erysipelas among the operations this morning. 
Are you not glad to hear that Number Twenty-five 
has pulled through all right?” 

^‘Oh, poor woman! yes, indeed. Don’t I seem 
pleased?” 

‘‘Yes, certainly, . . . but not as much as usual.” 

“Well, perhaps you are right. Monsieur Barnier; 
the truth is that I am out of sorts to-day ; I am in 
dread of something disagreeable.” 

She stopped, and as the surgeon did not speak, 
she went on : 

Oh, it is no secret. You know we sisters are 
not allowed to attach ourselves to anything. . . . 
That is why we are so often moved from ward to 
ward while we are novices. Well, I know I must 
expect it. ... I have often thought of it. . . . But 
still, when I heard the question of sending me over 
to the men’s side being discussed the other day, it 
had an odd effect on me ... it quite pained me. 
I can’t tell you why. ... I am so used to my 


132 


ONWS BUTT. 


ward, to my patients, to the faces around me, to 
my little room, to . . . everything here, in short. 
It is wrong to feel so, I know, but I can’t help it.” 

‘‘It is not decided, is it?” 

“No, not yet, . . . but I am afraid ” 

Well, then, we are both on the wing. . . . Only 
I shall not only change wards but hospitals. In a 
few months I shall be at the end of my two years 
as house-surgeon here. ... I shall have to go 
away somewhere else. ... I shall be sacked one 
of these days — forgive me, a slang word from the 
surgeons’ room— I shall be out of place. Like you, 
I shall be vexed to change. ... I know that by ap- 
plying and making a stir, as the committee is 
pleased with me, I might perhaps obtain a third 
year here as a favor.” 

“Ah ! you, too, will be vexed to change?” said the 
sister. “But for you,” she went on, after a silence, 
with bent face, “for you it is not the same as with 
us. . . . It is our duty to go away, especially as it 
costs us a pang not to remain where we are used to 
being. But for you there are no such reasons. 
You must ask to stay here. Monsieur Barnier. It 
would be a nice thing for me to have to tell your 
patients that you were going to leave them! I 
should be well received!” 


IN THE WOODS. 


133 


CHAPTER XIX. 

IN THE WOODS. 

^^^Yes, we had a very good time,” said the sur- 
geon to the sister. “We spent the day in the woods 
at Meudon. I went with Malivoire, the surgeon of 
the Saint Jean ward, and we came back by Belle- 
vue. We turned at the end of the Castle Avenue 
by a road to the right ... a charming little by- 
road; . . . there was the Seine below, . . . we 
could see it through the trees; . . . the evening 
was closing in ... it was splendid. We came 
from there by boat to Xeuilly. . . . Such an ex- 
quisitely mild night! It is really a very pretty 
country all about Bellevue. ...” 

“Ah! it is pretty?” 

“You have never been there?” 

“ Xo, I only know Saint Cloud. Is it finer than 
Saint Cloud?” 

“Finer? well, brighter. . . . There is such a 
view. ... Do you know Saint Germain?” 

“Xo.” 

“Ah! that is the place for view. From the ter- 
race one can see I don't know how many miles of 
country spread out like a map. Do you mean to 
say you have never been anywhere except to Saint 
Cloud?” 


134 


IN TEE WOODS. 


‘‘Yes.” 

“ There are many pretty spots. Chanton, for in- 
stance; . . . and, indeed, on every side. . . . One 
has only to get out of Paris and go straight on. . . . 
Bougival, again, is delightful. ... I could go on 
till to-morrow telling you of places I remember — all 
green, full of trees by the river-side . . . places 
that positively look as if they were happy, upon my 
word, and where even bad wine seems good. ...” 

“I shall never see all that,” said the sister. 


‘I AM TO remain: 


135 


CHAPTER XX. 

“l AM TO REMAIN.” 

The sister in her closet, one knee on her arm- 
chair, was with deft hand busily passing her little 
feather dust-brush over the black frame of a colored 
lithograph of Saint Therese, and over the other 
articles of furniture of her room, when Barnier 
passed by the door. Half -turning her head, she 
threw a word to him over her shoulder with a 
smile : 

‘‘ I am to remain. ...” 

And, as if she did not wish to say more, she 
turned herself gayly to the toilet of her little room, 
giving sharp sweeps of the feather brush to the 
table that sent the paper tickets fluttering to the 
floor. 


136 


SEALING ms LIPS, 


CHAPTER XXI. 

SEALING HIS LIPS. 

you know, I admire you, sister?” 

“Why?” said the sister, astonished at the ner- 
vous voice in which Barnier spoke that morning. 

“ . . . I admire and congratulate you on finding 
causes for faith and reasons for hope here in a 
hospital ward. I wish I could he like you ; I wish 
it all made me believe in something, seeing all this 
suffering and death ; . . . but I must be badly or- 
ganized, I suppose, for it has just the contrary ef- 
fect upon me.” 

“You are rather out of sorts to-day, Monsieur 
Barnier; I can see that.” 

“ Come, now, frankly, does no doubt ever assail 
you when you look at that line of beds, when you 
think of what lies beneath those sheets? The 
hospital speaks to you of a Providence, my sis- 
ter . . . To die— that is natural enough. If it 

were only a question of dying ! But why so much 
suffering? Why illness? Ah! I can assure you 
there are days when my mind revolts at it. . . . 
You can see an Eternal Father to he thanked at 
the end of that frightful vista. . . . For me, he 
who can poison the life he gave, torture the body 


SEALING HIS LIPS. 


137 


he made; he who invented the implacable necessity 
for doctors and surgeons— the God of the hospital, 
in short — is a deaf and merciless God, a God of 
bronze and of blood like the Christ hanging yon- 
der. ...” 

Monsieur Barnier, I pronounced my vows last 
Monday,” said the sister, in a tone that sealed the- 
surgeon’s lips. 


138 


TEE VALUE OF PB AYERS. 


CHAPTER XXII. 

THE VALUE OF PRAYERS. 

^ Ah, sister, the Rue de la Bienfaisance is by no 
means close at hand. In a little square just by it 
there were dresses hanging up lo dry on a cord 
stretched between two trees, that looked exactly 
like Blue Beard’s wives. Your invalid — what a 
case of true Parisian poverty! For sheets and for 
counterpane she had ... a heap of shavings ! And 
upon them the child was born!” 

“ Good heavens I is it possible? Shavings!” 

“All of which did not interfere with the fact that, 
at the foot of the bed — such a bed as it was — lay a 
superb infant, strong as a horse, and shouting as 
lustily as any one may wish. I examined her; 
there’s very little the matter with her — a mere 
nothing. I have just been telling her mother so as 
I came through the ward.” 

“ Ah I that was kind of you ; the poor woman 
was dreadfully anxious ; she could hardly lie still. 
Now, you know, I have not done with you yet; 
you must go for me to the husband of my Number 
Twelve; you understand. You will not get paid 
any more than for the woman of to-day . . . but 
it is I who will be answerable for your fees. Every 
time you make a visit for me in the family of one 


THE VALUE OF PRAYERS. 


139 


of my poor people I will say a prayer for you, a 
heartfelt prayer. . . . And a prayer from me is 
well worth forty sous, '‘is it not, Monsieur Bar- 
nier?” 


140 


TE0VQHT8 OF MARBIAGE. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE. 

the month of September Barnier took a holi- 
day. On his return the sister gayly welcomed him, 
saying : “ What a grand holiday you have had, to 
be sure! Why, you have grown quite fat, and 
what a color! You have been enjoying yourself, 
indeed.” 

^ “Yes, that I have. I had a lot of shooting. My 
■ little lad carried my game bag, and thought noth- 
ing of the weight. You have no idea how the little 
fellow has grown; he nearly comes up to my 
shoulder now. My mother intends to bring him up 
to town for a few days this winter, and then you 
will see. What a blessing it is to live in the open 
air ! Since my return here I find bad smells every- 
where, just like sailors when they first go to sea 
again, just for two or three days.” 

“And is that all you did in your whole month?” 
/ “Oh, yes; I went to a wedding, the wedding of 
one of my cousins. Such a wedding-breakfast ! It 
took place in a little wood belonging to the father- 
in-law. We danced fora week; the guests came 
every morning, and left every evening. They kept 
it up like that as long as there was anything to eat 


THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE. 


141 


and drink. The last day they made a bonfire with 
the empty casks.” 

“Didn’t it make you think of getting married?” 

“II... Oh ! it’s not likely that fancy will take 
me yet awhile.” 

“ Don’t say that ; you will marry, it is part of your 
business to marry. It must be such a relief after a 
day spent amid suffering and the horrible sights 
that doctors have to see, to find at the end some- 
thing that takes it all out of one’s head — a home, 
a wife waiting at the fireside. You must really feel 
the want of this happiness when you return from 
your rounds. And then children ! They are the 
very thing for you ; children who will make you 
plenty of noise, and whom their mother will teach 
to pray at night for your patients."^. 


142 


ABSENT, 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

ABSENT. 

One morning the Sister did not appear. She was 
absent several days from the ward, and was seen 
nowhere. For nearly a month past she had been 
heard to complain of unbearable headaches. When 
she returned to her work, she was pale as death, 
but took up her service with undiminished ardor, 
ever quick and active, and seemed to have recov- 
ered the full regularity and strength of her former 
health. 


THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 


143 


CHAPTEE XXV. 

THE children’s HOSPITAL. 

Jt was New Year’s Eve. The sister was talking 
^with the surgeon, taking the tone, half-playful, half 
serious, of an elder sister reading a gentle lecture 
to a brother of twenty. 

‘‘You were very fine yesterday, when you went 
out at five o’clock in such a hurry?” 

“I was going to dine out.” 

“You don’t look first-rate this morning. You are 
ill?” 

“Not a bit, but I came home late.” 

“You sat up all night, I bet.” 

“Oh! all night . . . that is to say. . .” 

“ It is Monsieur Malivoire who leads you away, I 
am certain.” 

“Malivoire? . . . Oh, poor fellow!” 

“ But what can you do to spend a whole night like 
that, when you might be sleeping? Sleep is such a 
delicious thing. Every night of my life I have to 
remind myself of my vows, and renew my sacrifice. 
If there were no bell to wake me, I should sleep all 
day. Laziness would have been my pet sin if I had 
been my own mistress. Can dancing be as amusing 
as all that?” 

“But I have not been to a ball. . . ” 


144 THE CHILBBEN'S HOSPITAL. 

‘‘ Oh ! I know what you did then. You sat smok- 
ing in a room where you were all smoking. That’s 
what does the harm! And then you played at 
cards, didn’t you and for money, I am sure. How 
naughty of you, instead of going to bed in good 
time. I am not joking. Your mother would say 
just the same as I do.” 

“What is this? asked Barnier, embarrassed by 
the conversation, and kicking his foot against a 
bundle that lay on the floor under the sister’s table. 

“Will you be good enough not to kick? You will 
break — ” and she stopped — “my New Year’s gifts! 
You would like to know what it is, would you not? 
Oh ! it is well wrapped up ; you won’t see anything. 
However, I won’t keep you in suspense. When I 
was quite little, I was taken to the Enfant Jesus” 
(the children’s hospital) one New Year’s day to 
see a little girl. On all the children’s beds, do you 
know what I saw? I have never forgotten it. 
There were playthings and harmless sweets. It 
was a princess, they told us, who had sent all that. 
It was charming! The pale faces of the sick 
children looked so bright and happy. If you could 
have seen them playing in their beds ! Well, as no 
one does anything here on that day for my patients, 
all the children who come here to-morrow shall 
have a toy and a little parcel of sweetmeats; just as 
at the Enfant Jesus. And you will see whether 
the mothers won’t be better pleased even than the 
children. 


LOVE. 


145 


CHAPTER XXVL 

LOVE. 

There were four of us— myself, Dubertrand, 
Noel, and his mistress. She is very taking, that 
girl of his.” 

It was Malivoire who spoke, as he lighted his 
candle at the gas-jet in the surgeons’ room, ad- 
dressing himself to Barnier, who, seated by the 
table, on his turn of night duty, was resting his 
head in his hands with his eyes fixed on a medical 
work he was studying. 

‘‘Yes, it was great fun. . . . The butler looked 
after us; you remember he was here, under Noel’s 
care. He brought us up some wine. . . . What 
wine ! like sloe juice !” 

Here Malivoire seated himself on the table, still 
holding the lighted candle in his hand. 

“Yes,” he went on, “she is decidedly pretty, that 
mistress of Noel’s.” 

“What do I care?” said Barnier. 

“Would you like to hear what we had for dinner? 
First of all we got there — not a place to be had. 
They had to lay our dinner in the bedroom of the 
manager’s wife, and over the bed hung her wed- 
ding-wreath under a glass shade. The wreath 
looked so foolish staring at us up there that at the 


U6 


LOVE. 


end we made a salad of it. Well, it wasn’t good. 

By the way, Emma was there. . . . She asked 
after you. . . . Ah! Barnier, talking of Emma, 
do you know it is really very odd?” 

“What?” 

“ That you have never been known to have a mis-/^ 
tress, ... no lasting attachment, call it what you 
will— a habit, if you like ; you have never stuck to 
any woman more than twelve hours.” 

“Well, twelve hours of any woman, don’t you 
think that enough?” 

And Barnier,, twirling his chair round and seat- 
ing himself astride of it, said as he reached his 
hand toward a pipe forgotten on the table : 

— ^“Malivoire, I am ashamd of you. Your ideas 
upon women are altogether astray. Do you know 
how our elders understood the matter? Better than 
you do, my fine fellow. When they had worked 
for a month or so, having their food brought to 
them in the amphitheater to save time, . . . worked 
day and night, mind you; what really may be 
called working- . . . Well, to shake it all off, they 
would rush into Paris like wolves, fling themselves 
into some places where they could have fcod, wine, 
and women. Thirty-six hours of it— a regular 
sailors’ orgy I That was the old school, the school 
of Bichat and the rest ; men built of real hard stuff 
and strong, who could drink something stronger 
than soda-water; and that school was the right 
one, old man!” 


LOVE, 


147 


,^Well, I maintain on the other hand — this is a 
stupid thing I am going to say to you, but it is true 
— 1 maintain that there are no men who need so 
much as we do to mix with passion something more 
than what you talk of, something else beyond mere 
desire. Yes, it sounds like paradox, as much as you 
please ; but for us, women ought not to be that at 
all. It is the surrounding of women, the grace 
and embellishment, that are good for us. It is the 
dress, the illusions, the pretty nonsense — in short, 
everything that is not the brutal fact! It is this 
that has the best chance of attracting us ; because, 
in this material, hoplessly material profession of 
ours our dreams and illusions must needs find an 
outlet and some satisfaction.” 

“Why, Malivoire, you are as platonic to-night as 
a drunken man.” 

“ I ! Not in the least ; only, I am telling you ” 

You talk nonsense!” said Barnier, impatiently, 
and with growing animation ; he resumed, “ If you 
were to say to me that after all we see the more we 
hunger after something young and fresh, a creature 
in the fullest bloom of life, beaming with life from 
head to foot, a body before which the memory of 
illness, age, infirmity fades, a woman who seems a 
living defiance to death, flesh that you might wish 
to dig your teeth into, as if it were splendid fruit, a 
skin from which the blood starts at the mere prick 
of a pin.” 

Barnier stopped short. He stared vaguely for a 


148 


LOVE. 


moment at the table crowded with empty bottles, 
cups of coarse pottery, saucers full of cigarette 
ends and matches drowned in the upset coffee; 
knives tossed on to the napkins, the plate of broken 
sugar, the well-colored clay pipes scattered here 
and there ; then resting his glance upon Malivoire : 

“You think I know nothing about love? You 
think I have never loved, don’t you?” 

At this moment the glass door of the surgeon’s 
room opened. A man entered, wearing a pointed 
beard, his blouse fastened round the waist by a belt. 

He had the immovable, pallid, cynical face com- 
mon to the male attendants in the hospital. Keeping 
his hands in his pockets, he said to Barnier as he 
slouched in : 

“It is for Number Nine of the Saint Paul ward. 
You know the fellow you tambourine la paillasse"^ 
this morning. He says he is suffocating, and he 
complains of it.” 


•'Auscultated. 


TEil BEMEDT, 


149 


CHAPTER XXVIL 

THE REMEDY. 

It is dreadful!” said Sister Philomene one even- 
ing to Barnier ; “ I cannot get rid of these neuralgic 
headaches. To-day I can hardly see. . . . Cannot 
you give me something to cure them?” 

“Indeed, I hardly know of any remedy. Stop, 
though, I can tell you of something that does me 
good; it might do you good also.” 

Barnier made a ward-maid bring a cup of black 
coffee, and taking up a bottle of laudanum : 

“There,” he said; “fifteen drops of laudanum in 
a cup of black coffee; that’s my remedy. . .” 

“Fifteen drops!” said the sister, startled. 

, “ I should take forty ; . . . however, I will only 

put in ten for you. . . ” And letting the drops fall 
one by one, he added, “ It is the law of contraries, 
which, by opposition . . . between us, I really don’t 
know what they do ; but what is certain is that it 
cures neurailga like a charm. . . You will only be 
a little long in getting asleep, that’s all. . . . How, 
drink it up and you’ll bless me.” 

After one gulp, the sister paused and said merrily : 

“I hope you will come and inquire to-morrow 
morning if you have poisoned me?” 


150 


THE UEMEBT. 


“ To-morrow ! Impossible, sister. I’m off for a 
couple of days in the country. . . to a friend’s. . . 
He has written to tell me the wild duck are over. . 
You see I’m not so very anxious about you .”— n 


I 


TROUBLED DREAMS. 


151 


CHAPTER XXYIII. 

TROUBLED DREAMS. 

^/^The fatigue of the day's work generally ex- 
hausted and used up the sister, and she had to 
struggle and fight off sleep every evening to be able 
to bring her prayers to a conclusion. 

This evening, however, her very lassitude seemed 
to keep her feverishly awake. She spent hours — 
heard one quarter of an hour after another strike — 
tossing restlessly under the bed-clothes that 
smothered her, seeking at every moment in the 
heated bed some fresh place to stretch her limbs 
and rest her cheek. Her dozing was cut short by 
sudden shocks that gave her the sensation of fall- 
ing from a height ; and her slumbers were filled by 
those dreams which are the strange torment of wo- 
men living in the chastity of a cloistered life. 

She fancied herself in space wherein all was 
light, though nothing visible to the eye save fiashes 
like those of a thousand candles sparkling through 
cut glass. The light resembled fiashes rolling 
among clouds — the radiancy of summer seen 
through a gossamer vail. In front of her spread 
vast horizons unpeopled, yet full of life. Life every- 
where, as in a ray of sun, resplendent though in- 
visible. These spaces were full of the silence of a 


152 


TROUBLED DREAMS. 


summer's day at noon — of the sighing of the hushed 
winds, of the sleeping corn, of the repose of mother 
earth, of the flight of songless birds, of melodies 
that were but murmurs and sighs> She seemed to 
inhale a breeze laden with morning dew, something 
like the moist dust scattered by the plash of a foun- 
tain. She was enveloped in all kinds of sweet and 
confused sensations, arising from vailed harmonies 
and shimmering lights, from mirages and echoes 
that lulled in a soft mist the airy dream of her 
slumbering senses. In the midst of this vision, in 
which she was oblivious of self, she felt on her neck 
a gentle touch, like that of a fly which in the morn- 
ing rests or hovers over the face of a sleeper^ She 
strove, in her dream, to chase away this touch 
which, ever flitting from place to place, came back 
with a teasing importunity ; but soon her hand be- 
came too slow and indolent to rid her of the sensa- 
tion, which after being irritant was now almost 
soothing.' And it was no longer a fly that brushed 
across her neck ; it seemed as though two butter- 
fly wings fluttered quicker and quicker against her 
skin. Then there came a moment when their touch 
became a caress.^ The two wings wandered instead 
of flying, and were two lips, two lips that had 
neither body nor face, nothing in the whole space 
but two lips; a mouth— a kiss— a kiss, like a soft 
caress whispering in her ear, a kiss which at last 
grew painful as a sting."^ 


A SUDDEN TEBBOB, 


153 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

A SUDDEN TERROR. 

/^It is half -past eight o’clock. The morning slowly 
dawns after a long February night, and the first 
light of a fine winter’s day streams over the Sainte 
Therese ward through the old greenish glass of the 
window panes. 

- In the middle of the ward some twenty young 
men, house-surgeons, dressers, and students in 
their second year, nicknamed bedouins, a portfolio 
under their arm, stand near a stove. They cluster 
round their chief, a pale old man with long white 
hair tucked behind his ears, and bushy black eye- 
brows shading a pair of sharp eyes full of youth 
and kindliness. The old man, dressed in a tail 
coat, white tie, and the rosette of the Legion of 
Honor in his button-hole, wears a great white apron 
that covers him up to the neck. A dark red velvet 
skull-cap placed over his white hair sets off his 
wide brows. He is calm and smiling; looks around 
him at the young men as he absently moves his 
hands over the stove and appears amused at some 
joke he has just uttered. Some of the young men 
who surround him have looped the corner of their 
large white apron to the button of their coat; others 


154 


A SUDDEN TEBROB. 


have fastened little bits of cloth full of pins on their 
lapels ; and all talk gayly but in a low tone, respect 
ful both of the master and the place they are in. 

However, the young men greet one another in 
whispers, and at moments the murmur of a wo- 
man’s name, or a reminiscence of a ball-room could 
be heard. Other groups are speaking to the 
patients. Two of the younger students, pursuing 
each other, stop by the side of a bed in which an 
invalid tightly presses her knees against her chin, 
and placing her elbows on the empty space at the 
foot of the bed, playfully struggles with clasped 
hands. 

On a long table placed between two stoves lie a 
quantity of bandages already rolled. A pile of lit- 
tle sponges is placed near a heap of snowy white 
lint, and a small box full of pots of yellow or 
brown ointment stands alongside, with the ends of 
spatulas sticking out. A spirit-lamp sends a fitful 
flicker on the copper basins, and on the two pewter 
fountains at each end of the table, used one for 
washing and the other for tisanes. A house-sur- 
geon, bending over the table, consults a large book 
the different columns of which are headed thus — 
Tisanes : remedies, external and internal ; broths, 
with rice, with vermicelli, with meat, with milk ; 
bread, soups; with meat or without; solid food 
Ho. 1, 2, 3, 4; dietetic drinks: wine, milk. Stand- 
ing with her back to the table, a stout, short ward- 
maid rubs up a tin water- jug, which shines in her 


A SUDDEN TERROB. 


J55 


big hands, while she blinks her little, red-edged 
eyes. 

The ward is well-aired and has no odor ; only a 
kind of damp heat pervades the whole room — the 
tepid atmosphere of a bath-room. 

^ In the clear, cold, pale daylight each bed, with its 
woolen quilt or eider-down cover, and its tester 
of white dimity catching the light, stands sharply 
defined as a square of white. Eays of light shine on 
the foot of the beds, run over the sheets, flit over 
the sleeves of patients sitting up in bed. The 
placards above the beds display their outlines all 
along the ward, white when the bed is occupied, 
black when it is empty. In the bluish glimmer 
can be seen over the bedsteads small shelves above 
the patients’ heads, on which are pots of jam, 
medicine bottles, oranges, and sometimes a book. 
Between the open curtains hang the little bars by 
which the invalids raise themselves. 

There lie the women, many of whom appear 
shrouded in their sheets. A cheek, a bit of fore- 
head, a round and huddled up body, is all that can 
be seen of them on the bolster or under the blankets. 

Others lie on their backs motionless, their knees 
upraised making sharp angles. Several with heads 
uplifted on pillows clasp their right wrists with 
their left hand, with an abstracted gaze, in the at- 
titude of a person feeling his own pulse. In the 
beds near the door a certain commotion is going 
on ; a kind of toilet, a little coquettish preparation. 


156 


A SUDDEN TEBROR. 


revives the strength of the least suffering. Their 
thin, blue-veined hands tremblingly button the cuff 
of a night-gown or flatten the wrinkles from a 
night-jacket; one patient carefully takes down a 
trimmed cap, pinned up inside the bed-curtains, 
while another smooths her hair. 

They are all pallid, of a pallor that looks ashen 
when contrasted with the whiteness of the sheets, 
pillows, and curtains. Lying thus expectant, so 
wan against the clear white of the linen, their eyes 
dilated by fever, these poor working-women no 
longer seem to belong to their class ; each one bears 
that singular appearance of distinction that illness 
seems to impart to the women of the people, as 
though there were in reality in every woman — be 
she great lady or workwoman from the most 
poverty-stricken part of the town— the same charm 
and grace developed by suffering ! 

The students have hung their hats on the placards 
over the beds ; and the chairs have been piled up 
on end to leave a free passage for the surgeon. 

Near a window, with her back to the light, her 
white vail throwing a luminous halo around. Sister 
Philomene stands knitting a stocking. 

^^‘Come, gentlemen,” says the head surgeon, and 
walking to the end of the ward, he goes up to the 
first bed on the left-hand side. Upright, walking 
stiffly, he advances with a slow, regular step over 
the polished tiles. The ward-maid follows him, 
carrying in one hand a towel and a pewter jug, in 


A SUDDEN TERROR. 


157 


the other a pewter basin that she rests against her 
hip. 

When the head surgeon stops at a bed, it is im- 
mediately surrounded by the junior surgeons, who 
press around, bending over the patient, pushing 
their heads over or under one another. 

A silence, an anxious and respectful, almost 
solemn, silence reigns over the whole ward. The 
pen of the student who has charge of the prescrip- 
tion books, and who writes leaning against the foot 
of the bed, can be heard scratching busily. All 
are quiet, every suffering is hushed as the head 
surgeon passes along, going from patient to patient 
with the same gentle, imperturbable face, a hope- 
ful and encouraging smile, cheering and cheerful 
words, sometimes even a good-natured joke. 

“Well!” he says to a woman on whose throat he 
has performed an operation only a few days pre- 
viously, “you know this is the day you promised 
to sing us a song. Come, give us a tune.” 

And he listens attentively to the sounds that 
struggle out of the throat of the brightened and 
enlivened patient. 

“An extra ration for Number Nine,” says the 
doctor after a moment’s pause by a bedside. A 
smile reanimates the countenance of the pale young 
woman seated in the bed, while life flashes again 
into her fevered and hollow eyes like a spark of 
radiant joy. 


158 


A SUDDEN TERROR. 


The doctor has reached the last bed but one, bed 
Number Twenty -nine. 

“Ah! yesterday’s arrival,” he said, reading the 
placard at the foot of the bed. 

The patient unfastened her night-dress, and a 
house-surgeon raised the bed-curtains to allow the 
daylight to fall upon her while the head surgeon 
made his examination. The patient watched the 
surgeon’s face, but it remained impassible. 

After a few seconds the curtain fell back in its 
place. The woman, with closed eyes, heard the 
doctor turn away and move off. Then a sudden 
terror sent an icy shudder down her back, and she 
dived into the bed, pulled up the clothes, and buried 
her head in the pillows. 

“Is Monsieur Barnier there?” inquired the doctor 
as he passed on to the next bed, and he raised his 
head, scrutinizing the group of young doctors. 

“Here he comes,” replied a voice. 

The students were gathered round the bed at 
which the head surgeon had stopped. Barnier'^ 
slipped behind them, on the side next to the one the 
surgeon had just quitted. 

He stood opposite the surgeon, waiting for him 
to speak, when he suddenly felt from behind a hand 
seize his own. He turned around, and stood ter- 
rified, like a man who beholds the specter of a wo- 
man he has loved. 

“What are they going to do to me, Barnier?” said 
the patient, in a low tone. 


A SUDDEN TERROR. 


159 


“You!” said Barnier, “you here?” 

“What are they going to do to me, eh? tell me.” 

“Monsieur Barnier!” the surgeon called out as 
he was leaving. 

Barnier went to him, and as he was going down 
stairs the surgeon said : 

Monsieur Barnier, I understand that the house 
surgeons complain that they leave the hospitals 
without having had an opportunity of performing 
operations. I am willing, therefore, to give you a 
trial. To-morrow you will operate on the new ar- 
rival, Number Twenty-nine. You saw her: a Zar- 
daceous encephaloid in the right breast. I advise a 
convex bistoury for the tegumentary incision, and 
a straight knife for the remainder of the operation ; 
and curve your first incision.” 


160 


FIBST LOVR 


CHAPTER XXX. 

FIRST LOVE. 

The surgeon went on talking, but Barnier no 
longer heard him. 

He had loved this woman, and had been her first 
lover. She, too, had been his first love — the first 
awakening of his passions. She came from the vil- 
lage in which he was born— a tiny river-side village 
on the banks of the Marne. Her father was the 
owner of the towing-horses along the Manx Canal. 
The village, with its long line of straight poplar 
trees, the river, the ducks, the horses that went 
down to water, the slated roofs, the house, her win- 
dow, where in the evening the dark green of the 
vine leaves stood out against the lighted curtains • 
the first kiss he had imprinted on her neck • the 
barn full of hay, where the sun streaming through 
the door played upon the edge of her gown ; the lit- 
tle wall which she jumped over, when all the house 
was asleep, to go off to the ball, and the little gully 
where they wandered in summer time— how far 
and yet how near it all seemed, how lost in the 
past, and yet how living, as if it were but yester- 
day!- — - 

^ And when she had insisted on following him to 


FIBST LOVE. 


161 


Paris, where he had come to study medicine, what 
happy days they had spent — a carnival full of 
folly, excursions in the country, improvised sup- 
pers at the foot of their bed ; her delight at a new 
and becoming gown, and the little fits of jealousy 
dissipated in a caress! Till at last she had left 
him, and his student’s room, still full of her 
memory, had seemed to him empty — empty as a 
warm nest from which the birds have fiown. 

/'^ll these recollections rushed in headlong con- 
fusion to his mind, and fioated before his eyes. 


162 


NOT ALWAYS FUN. 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

NOT ALWA'XS FUN. 

After going the round of the men’s wards, Bar- 
nier returned to the bedside of the sick woman. 

“.What did he say to you?” she asked, catching 
hold of his hands. “Will you have to use — your 
instruments?” 

And Barnier felt her shudder. 

“No, no,” stammered Barnier. Ah ! my poor 
Romaine, how sad to see you here!” 

“Ah, yes! But I have led such a life since i left 
you. I have had ups and downs — more downs than 
anything else,” she added, with a forced smile. “It 
has not always been fun. You see there are men 
who must break everything when they are drunk, 
glasses— women. And this is the result of a blow 
from my last lover — look!” And she bared her 
bosom. 

“ Will they cut it off ; tell me, they won’t cut it 
off, will they?” At the same moment Sister Philo- 
mene drew near the bed, and in a tone that Barnier 
had never heard from her lips : 

“Number Twenty-nine,” she said, “you are talk- 
ing too loud ; you disturb your neighbors, and you 
yourself need quiet, a great deal of quiet.” 


NOT ALWAYS FUN. 


163 


And the sister went up to the bedside and almost 
drove Barnier from it, sharply tucking up the 
clothes to the very bolsters. 

“Sister,” said Barnier, following the sister, as she 
left the bedside, “I wish you would try — you who 
know how to inspire courage ; I do not know how, 
in fact I cannot . . . She is a woman I knew in 
former days and I have not the heart to speak to 
her ; she is to be operated on to-morrow. There 
is only to-day to prepare her.” 

“She is to be operated on to-morow?” said the 
sister in a singular tone, letting her words drop 
coldly one by one. 

Barnier was obliged to repeat, “Yes, to-morrow. 
She is afraid, you saw that ; hers is a nervous, ex- 
cessively nervous nature. I implore you to speak 
to her and prepare her. You are so kind. I have 
so often seen you succeed when we have failed. 
Tell her it will be nothing of an operaton. And get 
her to consent without alarming her.” 

After a moment’s silence the sister said, turn- 
ing her face to Barnier, who was astonished at her 
pained expression, “I will speak to her . . . and 
perhaps ^'’-od will put the right words into my 
heart.” 

Barnier went up to his room. He spent the 
whole day musing over the past love that had not 
died, and intoxicating memories rose up within 
him, memories filled with the pungent perfume of 
wild flowers and fruit. At every moment he felt 


164 


NOT ALWAYS FUN. 


tempted to go and see Romaine, but he dared not 
venture near her bedside ; he feared a word or a 
question, and his fear carried the day. He re- 
membered that the sister was to speak to her, and 
trembled lest she should not succeed in deciding her 
to consent to the operation. The next moment he 
felt perssuaded that the sister had succeeded, and 
then, thinking on the morrow, he shuddered. He 
said to himself that his place was by the side of 
Romaine, that he ought to help the sister to over- 
come her fears — that he, too, ought to speak to her, 
tell her that the operator would be merciful to her 

poor body And he remained there, in his 

room, feeling all strength fail him, and his eyes 
wandering in spite of himself over the cold steel in- 
struments in his case. 


FEBSUASION, 


165 


CHAPTER XXXII 

PERSUASION. 

Two women were conversing in the Sainte 
Therese ward; one was the woman embroidering 
already mentioned, and the other an old woman 
with a bandage over her eyes. 

“ I say, you who are working, can you tell me if 
it will soon be four o’clock?” 

“ Certainly ; it is past four now ; it is getting dark 
enough to know that.” 

“Dark enough, yes, when one has eyes.” 

“Ah! that is true; I forgot.” 

“ How is it we don’t hear Sister Philomene to-day? 

“She is generally so punctual.” 

“ Perhaps she is not well ; she did not look all 
right this morning. You did not notice that she 
never called the little girl of Number Five to give 
her a trifle, as she always does. Ah ! here she is. 
She is by the side of Number Twenty-nine. The 
ward-maid told me they were going to do something 
to-morrow to Number Twenty-nine. That is the 
reason she is there. She is trying all her influence 
to make her consent. Can you, who are nearer to 
her, hear what she is saying?” 

^“Certainly I cTan hear her. What a strange tone 


166 


pehsuasion. 


she has; not her usual nice voice, you know, the 
voice that would make one consent to anything.” 

“Ah, well, you see there is not much time to be 
lost, and probably the other one is reluctant. When 
there is plenty of time they don’t hurry one. I 
have had plenty of time to find that out. They 
coax one; ah! they know what they are about. 
They see at once, at a glance, if you are one of the 
nervous sort, as they say. Then for two or three 
days they say hardly anything, or, 'We must see 
about that, we must think over the case,’ and 
vague words of that kind. Then you begin to 
think about it all; you don’t know if they will 
operate or not, but that is of no consequence ; your 
imagination works, and little by little you get accus- 
tomed to the idea. When they see this, they begin 
to say in a careless, off-hand manner, Tf I were 
in your place— however, you must suit yourself— 
but if I were in your place, I should just get rid of 
that!’ Then they leave you alone again for a day 
or two to think it over, till at last, one fine morning, 
they tell you point-blank, 'My good soul, if you 
won’t have that thing taken away; it will soon 
carry you off.’*^ 

“You are struck all of a heap, but as for the last 
week you have been in an agony of suspense, you 
decide on ending the whole matter. However, that 
is not the case with this new patient.” 

“What is, she saying to the sister? Can you 
hear? Does she consent?” 


PEBSUASION. 


167 


o “So-so, she does not say much. She is muttering 
something about her ‘poor body;’ that seems to be 
her only thought. Ah! how harshly the sister 
speaks to her, indeed. It is not in that manner she 
would have made me consent if I had been hesitat- 
ing. How dreadfully she is talking of death, to be 
sure!” 

“ The fact is, if one was not a little frightened, 
one would never consent. Ah! the sister has 
finished at last. Here she comes, and it’s true she 
is looking ill.” ^ 


168 


^BETIER TO HAVE DIED r 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 

« BETTER TO HAVE DIED!” 

The next day, at about eleven o’oclock, two at- 
tendants, wearing caps marked A. P.* in red, 
came into the ward bearing a stretcher on which 
lay a pallid, woe-begone creature, with a hunted, 
haggard look, features contracted by pain, and a 
countenance impressed with terror, almost shame. 

The house-surgeon and Sister Philomene, aided 
by an under-nurse, carefully placed the woman in 
bed, and when Romaine was once settled, with 
her head raised high on the pillows, and her right 
arm resting on a cushion, a sudden sensation of re- 
lief came over her ; the feeling of submissive fear 
and shame common to patients after an operation, 
that makes them look like children that have just 
been chastised. 

I love you, Barnier,” she said, and she poured 
forth a torrent of tender, loving words, which burst 
from her lips like a shower of kisses, in a passion of 
feeling that was almost brutal. 

Barnier made her a sign to be quiet, and after 
impressing on her the necessity of keeping still, he 


Assistance Publiqne. 


^BETTER TO HA VE DIED /” 


169 


hastily left the ward, while on the placard at the 
foot of the bed was being written; 

Operated on February 7th, 

He met Malivoire on the stairs, who said: 

“Are you coming to breakfast?” 

“No,” he replied, “I am not hungry this morn- 
ing.” And hurrying to his room, faint and sick at 
heart, he flung himself into an arm-chair. 

The figure of the woman rose up before him, re- 
lentlessly haunting him. His eyes recalled once 
more the fresh, youthful bosom of the girl he had 
loved, on which he had often pillowed his head, and 
now the cold steel blade was torturing it, his own 
hand was lacerating it. The horrible sight would 
not vanish ; all had begun afresh, and he seemed 
to be recommencing again and again the operation 
he had but just now performed. His apron was 
stained with blood, but he had not noticed it ; he 
threw it from him and went up to the Sainte 
Therese ward. 

On seeing him Romaine half-opened her eyes and 
smiled to him, the speechless smile by which sick 
people beg to be left to their sufferings, their 
thoughts, to silence, and to rest. 

He returned several times to her bedside, and 
each time Romaine greeted him with the same 
gentle, drowsy, listless smile. 

At his last visit, in the middle of the night; 

/ ‘ Barnier,” she said, in such a faint voice that the 


170 


^BETTER TO HAVE DIED T 


surgeon was obliged to bend down to hear her, “ you 
have seen my body after. ... it is horrible, isn’t 
it? It is a large wound. ... I shall be an object of 
disgust. ... It would be better to be dead, would it 
not? Why did the sister come and urge me? Who 
will care for me now? Ah! yes, I had better have 
died. You who thought I had such a good figure, 
you who were so proud of me — do you remember? 
Even you would not have the courage to look at 
the place now I It would indeed have been better 
to have died!” 'A/' 


THE FJi0FEB80H8 ADMONITION, 


171 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 

THE professor’s ADMONITION. 

/'^'Wh.y are you so restless, my child? You must 
try and remain quiet,” said the head surgeon the 
following morning. 

He went up to her, looked at her, felt her pulse, 
then uncovering her chest, listened for a long time 
to her breathing. You do not detect anything 
abnormal. Monsieur Barnier, do you, either in the 
action of the heart or lungs?” 

“No, nothing.” 

‘‘Exactly, neither do I. You* are going on very 
well, my child.” 

When he reached the end of the ward, the head 
surgeon turned to the house-surgeons and dressers, 
saying, “ Gentlemen, I had said there would be no 
lecture to-day ; I have changed my mind, we will 
go down to the amphitheater.” 

And when the surgeons and students had taken 
their places on the benches : 

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I wish to call your atten- 
tion to the patient Number Twenty-nine. The 
operation intrusted by me to one of you has been 
most skillfully performed. I could not have done 
it better myself than Monsieur Barnier. You have 
just seen that poor woman, and noticed how care- 


172 


THE PEOFESSOR’S ADMONITION. 


fully I examined her lungs and heart. I requested 
Monsieur Barnier also to repeat the experiment, 
and you heard us declare that we found all the 
organs in their normal condition. The patient is 
neither suffering from erysipelas, nor phlegmon, 
nor does her state betray symptoms of peritonitis, 
pleurisy, pericarditis, or any abdominal lesion. 
There is nothing that should alarm us, and yet I 
must confess I am most seriously alarmed. QN e 
are forced to admit, gentlemen, however painful 
the admission,” the surgeon gloomily pursued, 
“that our knowledge and experience often meet 
with mysteries that thwart and humiliate us, mys- 
teries that we cannot fathom, notwithstanding all 
our studies, which we fail to understand in spite of 
all our efforts, and which we are obliged to explain 
by the word, accident ! because we have no other to 
explain the incomprehensible, ^ome five or six 
years ago I operated a patient for the same trouble ; 
the day after the operation I found her worried, 
anxious, agitated, feverish, and restless, without 
having been able to detect any internal disorder 
any more than in our present case. At the end of 
three days she died and the post-mortem examina- 
tion gave no explanation of the cause of her death 
nor did it reveal any important injury."^ Monsieur 
Barnier, you are now fully warned; watch your 
patient most carefully, and treat her by the most 
energetic means.”' 


HOPELESS. 


173 


CHAPTER XXXV. 

HOPELESS. 

“I am SO thirsty ; give me something to drink!” 
Romaine exclaimed the moment the house-surgeon 
came up to her bed. “Ah, I dont’ feel well.” 

She did nothing but toss about, turn her head 
from side to side, stretch out her arms and raise her 
legs one after the other. She complained of suf- 
focations, pains in the back, sickness, and a general 
sensation of lassitude. Barnier spent the whole 
day and night watching and tending her, opposing 
violent remedies to the violence of the malady ; 
but his efforts were powerless to assuage the fever, 
calm the agitation, stanch the thirst, and lull even 
for an hour the restlessness of those limbs that un- 
ceasingly moved beneath the sheets. 

In the morning the head surgeon changed the 
dressing. The wound presented a natural appear- 
ance, but the patient was in a state approaching 
that of delirium and her case was pronounced hope- 
less.^ 


in 


DELIBIUM, 


CHAPTER XXXVI. 

DELIRIUM. 

Romaine no longer spoke to Barnier. All of a 
sudden, in the middle of the day, she abruptly 
seized his hands, entwining her fingers in his, 
clutching hold of him with all her might, and fixing 
on him her large eyes, of which the pupil had be- 
come mere black dots amid the surrounding white. 

“I shall not die, shall I, Barnier?” she said, in a 
voice that was choked and suffocated at intervals. 

“I will not die ... I won’t, no I wont’! My 
dear Barnier, make me live. ... I am too young 
to die. The priest has been ; he was here a minute 
ago. . . . But you are nothing but a trumpery set 
of doctors here, then ! . . . Oh, I’ve got hold of 
you; you can’t make me let go. . . . There! I 
don’t care about losing my beauty ... do anything 
you like, only let me live, only that — live! live!” 

Then hardly had she uttered these words than, 
with a gesture of horror, she thrust away Barnier’s 
hands, which she had been holding as in a vise. 
^“Ah, butcher!” she exclaimed, “how you cut 
away, how jmu hacked at me. It was nothing to 
you, nothing but fiesh. . . Get away ! . . . How 
glad I am I left you. ... I only wish 1 had left a 
worse life, had had more fun, deceived more men!” 


DELIRIUM. 


175 


And she laughed, and her laugh broke into a sob. 

“Romaine, Romaine, I entreat you!” said Bar- 
nier. 

But the dying woman again caught hold of him. 

, ‘^The others! what do I care about them? . . . 
They may all die for aught I care! But I am 
young; I am strong; my life is not over. ... We 
live to be old in our family . . . I’ve never had any- 
thing the matter with me. ... I used to cross the 
bridges in the winter when it was freezing, with 
nothing but a chemise on my back. Do you re- 
member those Saturdays, the nights of the masked 
balls? What does that dog of a sister want, hang- 
ing round here? Much I shall care for all her 
thrash when I shall be out of this place ! . . . Oh, 
God how I suffer . . . What thirst! . . . Ah, 
butcher ! if I had caught hold of you with my teeth 
at the moment you’d have felt how I can bite. . . . 
Yes, drink . . . give me somethng to drink. . . my 
tongue is as dry as wood !” 

She drank, her fingers let go, and she sank back 
jnto the heavy exhausted sleep which seems a fore- 
taste of death sent to those who are about to die. 

Barnier, utterly broken down, fied ; and he heard, 
as he passed near a sick-bed, Sister Philomene say 
between the curtains : 

■'‘''^•‘Yes, it is really abominable. That kind of 
women ought not to be admitted here. There 
ought to be separate rooms for them, where they 
would at least die without making such a scandal.” j 


176 


THE QATHEBINQ IN THE WARD. 


CHAPTER XXX VIL 

THE GATHERING IN THE WARD. 

’^Dinner was just over, and the munching of the 
last crusts of bread sounded through the ward like 
the nibbling of mice. 

Two young women, in flying white caps, white 
jackets, and black skirts, were walking arm-in -arm 
up and down the room laughing and joking like a 
. oouple of tomboys. 

“Sister! Mother!” they said, repeating in a jeer- 
ing tone the names exchanged by the sister and 
under-nurses. “ It is quite a family affair here ; it 
is only sons that are never mentioned.” 

And they laughed aloud, till one of the two, 
dragging her leg, said to the other : 

“Xot so quick, please; it hurts my hip.” 

A drawling, plaintive voice, panting at each 
word, issued from a bed and muttered : 

Some talk of their legs . . . others ... of their 
arms . . . others . . . every one seems in pain in 
here.” 

A scream rose from another bed. 

“How she howls!” said the two girls as they re- 
sumed their walk up and down. 

^“Oh, what a milksop!” called out a patient from 
her bed; “she makes herself at home. She 


THE QATHERim IN THE WARD. 177 

wouldn’t dare to scream like that if the doctor were 
here.” 

“Ah! well, I sha’n’t scream like that to-morrow,” 
uttered a voice, striving to steady itself. 

“To-morrow!” replied another, in hollow tones. 

“I wish to-morrow were come, that I might know 
what they are going to do to me.” 

“ So would I. I would give anything this night 
were over.” 

It’s awful to see any one die like that right un- 
der your nose,” said the patient on the right-hand 
side of Number Twenty-nine’s bed. “She’s been 
an hour picking at her sheets.” 

“ The lady is picking up her things ready to be 
off,” said the girls as they passed by. 

The day was drawing to a close. A mysterious 
twilight had already begun to throw a vail over the 
whole ward, and the waning light, pale as a ray of 
the moon, looked like a vapor driven upward to the 
tops of the curtains or testers by the dark shadows 
rising from the floor. The dull, opaque windows 
showed only a patch of twilight on the uppermost 
panes, and above, against the curtain-rod, a last 
glimmer threw a wide splash of light on the first 
fold of the curtains. The two extremities of the 
ward were already enveloped in shade, but at the 
end where the sister’s glass den fell under the light 
of a window a la«t faint ray of light, passing 
through the muslin curtains, created a kind of haze, 
something similar to the mist seen at dawn rising 


178 


THE' QATEERIEO IN TEE WARD. 


from a field covered with hoar-frost. Against this 
background of haze the passers to and fro were 
vaguely and indistinctly seen like shadows flitting 
by. 

The little pulleys and chains by which the night- 
lights were suspended creaked as they worked 
when, one after the other, the night-lamps were 
lowered and brought within reach of the ward- 
maid who lighted them. 

Then, at one end of the dark, somber ward, where 
the dim flame of the farthest night-light flickered 
between four columns in front of a small altar, the 
darkness seemed to grow alive and fill with 
shadowy figures. It was a confused and automatic 
kind of gathering, seemingly increased by black 
or white forms at every moment, although not a 
step of the assembling figures, not a rustle of the 
crowding skirts, could be heard, so noiselessly did 
they move. 

When they reached the circle of light cast by the 
night-light, into which they laboriously carried 
their chairs, the invalids stood revealed; a tall, 
black woman, her spare form tightly wrapped in a 
little black shawl tied at the back, walking with 
her arms advanced like a person afraid of falling ; 
then a couple of little old women came, arm-in- 
arm, with short, faltering steps and bent backs, 
one holding up the chair which the other carried ; 
a tall young woman with a coil of black hair fall- 
ing low on her neck moved forward alone, looking 


THE GATHERING IN THE WARD. 


179 


slight and . even elegant in the gray hospital cos- 
tume ; then the two laughing girls ; then a woman 
with a colored handkerchief on her head and her 
arm slung in a scarf fastened to her white jacket; 
then a country woman with her peasant’s cap. 
Half-carried by two women, who supported her un- 
der each arm, a pretty young woman painfully 
drew near, smiling — with her head slightly thrown 
back — a sweet, sad smile to her companions, who 
as she seemed to give way, said, encouragingly: 

‘‘Come, come, step, Madame Lazy-bones.” 



Sister Philomene, standing on the altar-steps, 
slowly lit the eight tapers in the two candlesticks, 
saying, from time to time, “ Hush ” without turn- 


180 


THE OATHERim IN THE WARD. 


iug round, when the murmur of voices behind her 
grew too loud. 

By degrees, as the flame rose from the candle- 
sticks, a white Virgin with a blue silk collar, paper 
hydrangeas in gilded wooden vases, a little waxen 
infant Jesus in a manger surmounted by a pointed 
roof and cross over all, stood out, brilliantly re- 
vealed ; and the burning tapers cast their light on 
the side of the altar over the top of a tall press, 
where a quantity of white wooden crutches and 
crooked sticks had been thrown. 

The patients were seated on chairs placed in 
a circle ; the young woman who was so weak had 
the only arm-chair present, and her two com- 
panions placed a pillow at her back and covered 
her legs with an eider-down quilt. 

The sister went up to a small bell against the 
wall. She rang a first peal, waited for a moment’s 
silence, then rang a second peal and said in a clear 
voice, “Let us pray,” and fell on her knees on the 
floor in the middle of the circle before the altar. 

X Her voice rose amid the silence, it ascended un- 
der the vaulted roof with a penetrating vibration, 
and in a quiet, piercing tone that sounded like a 
kind of melody. It was a sharply modulated voice, 
pure as crystal, thin and clear like a child’s; vir- 
ginal like the song of a bird ; a voice like the soul 
of a musical instrument which seemed to pour forth 
the prayer she uttered. 

/\The sister began by thanking God for all His 


THE GATHERING IN THE WARD. 


181 


mercies for having created us from nothing; for 
daily betowing His blessings upon us ; and making 
herself the medium of the patients’ gratitude, 
speaking in the name of the sick, the fevered, and 
the suffering, she said, What return, oh, my God, 
can I make for Thy innumerable blessings? Oh, 
all ye saints and angels, unite with me in praising 
the God of mercies, who is so bountiful to so un- 
worthy a creature I” And from the end of the ward 
a stifled murmur of voices from the bed-ridden 
patients mingled with her voice. 

At this noise a scream came from Romaine’s bed, 
and a confused sound of blasphemous words broke 
in through the prayers. 

^^-^Let us examine our consciences,” continued the 
sister, in the same tone. “ Let us examine what 
sins we may have fallen into by thought, word, deed 
or omission.” 

And after a moment’s silence, her voice rose 
again, clear and calm : “ I grieve from the bottom 
of my heart that I have been so ungrateful to Thee 
for Thy benefits, and have so often offended Thee, 
my God and my chief good.” 

“The priest! the priest! Here, shake the cur- 
tains!” yelled Romaine. “Ah ! they are at mass, 
they are singing. Ah ! what foolery their church 
is. . . . They have left the door open. . . . Barnier 
they are coming ; I hear them. ... Ah ! the death 
doctor. . . . Get out, wretched priest!” 

“Let us pray!” said the sister, in an authoritative 


182 


TEE QATEERIEG IN TEE WARE. 


and severely firm voice : “ Our Father, who art in 
heaven. Hallowed be Thy name.” 

And the invalids answered from their chairs or 
beds with a rumbling hum, which died away by 
degrees as one after the other of the feeblest uttered 
a tardy Amen. 

‘‘No music! What a nuisance they are! Take 
away the fiowers — they stink ! They don’t know 
how to sing. I tell you I know a better song than 
that. Wait a bit; it’s a funny kind of tune, and 
Romaine sang : 

La petite Rosette, 

Voulant voir du pays, 

Passant a la barriere 
Un commis Varreta, 

Sui disant: La petite mere, 

Que portez vous done la? 

Approchez, belle blonde, 

Appy^ochez de plus pres'^^ * 

* Little Rosette 
Wishing to travel. 

Passing through the gates 
The toll-man stopped her, 

Saying : “ My little woman, 

What are you carrying? 

Come near, fair one. 

Come nearer to me.” 

“Hail, Mary, full of grace ...” said the sister, 
raising her voice, which became louder, stronger, 
and more dominent as she pitilessly dwelt on the 
last words of the Ave: “Pray for us sinners now 
and at the hour of our death.” 


THE GATEEUINQ IN THE WABD. 


183 


“Come away!” cried Romaine. “I will climb over 
the little wall. Oh, he loved me well. Ah, I know 
they say he was a love child.” 

“I believe in God ... 1 confess to Almighty 
God ...” said the sister, and her emotionless voice 
commanded silence; it was like a hand of iron 
placed over the mouth of agony, sternly crushing 
back the delirium hovering on the lips of death. 

“Lord, have mercy. . . Christ, have mercy!” 
and she let the verses fall in a harsh tone, dropping 
on the wretched woman the words of the Litany of 
the Sacred Heart one by one, like handfuls of 
smothering earth. 

“Barnier!” called out Romaine in a broken voice 
that seemed a wail, “ I want my teeth and my hair 
to be left with me ... I won’t have the amphi- 
theater porters. ...” 

The sister went on: “Rembember, oh, most 
gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known 
that any one who fled to thy protection, implored 
thy help, and sought thy intercession was left un- 
aided.” 

And her voice lost its inexorable accent; no 
longer did she seem to denounce or condemn; all 
the sweetness of a woman’s voice, the tenderness 
of an invocation, seemed at each word to come back 
to her. 

“Underneath,” said Romaine, in a fast fading 
voice, “ yes, underneath, under my chemises . . . 
look ... it is there . . . my prayer book . . . 


184 


THE GATHERING IN THE WARD. 


there, hidden away ... do look ... it is under- 
neath. ... oh ! no ... no book . . . leave it . . . 
no! no! no!” 

“Our Lady of Sorrows! have mercy upon us!” 
said the sister, and the emotion of her heart moved 
by compassion made her voice tremble and quiver. 
At moments even her memory failed and she hesi- 
tated for words. 

“No . . . no . . .” again repeated Eomaine, in a 
dreamy tone. And what she was about to utter 
died away on her lips under the peaceful breath of 
the sister’s voice beginning again the Novena, the 
Pater, Ave, Credo, and Confiteor, with so sweet a 
tenderness, such a feeling of softness, such an ac- 
cent of caressing pity that it sounded like a 
guardian angel lulling an agony to sleep. 

Suddenly a horrible scream, “ Help, madame the 
sister !” made the sister run to Eomaine’s bedside. 
She knelt down and remained there in prayer till 
she felt in her hands clasped by the dying woman 
the hands of the dead grow cold./~N^ 


ON THE UTliETOHEH. 


185 


CHAPTER XXXYIII. 

ON THE STRETCHER. 

After he had so hurriedly fled on the previous 
day, Barnier had not reappeared in the hospital. 
It was only the following morning that he came 
back with his trousers muddy and stained with red- 
colored earth up to the knees. He had wandered 
all that night no one knew whither. 

He went hastily up the stairs leading to the Sainte 
Therese ward, and almost unconsciously walked 
straight into the middle of the room. The curtains 
round Romaine’s bed were drawn close, the 
placard had disappeared. Instinctively he put out 
his hand for support, and feeling the end of the 
big table, sat down on it with one leg hanging. 
Behind him he heard a sound of approaching steps, 
the measured tread of men bearing something. A 
terrified whisper ran from bed to bed, “ia hoite a 
chocolat! la hoite a chocolat!” and a couple cf male 
attendants carrying a covered stretcher brushed 
past him. 

The two men placed the stretcher at the foot of 
the bed. They took off and put down on the ground 
by the side of it the convex top covered with brown 
American cloth. The bed-curtains slipped over the 
iron bars. In the bed lay stretched a long figure 


186 


ON TEE STHETCHEB. 


wrapped in a large white sheet fastened by a big 
knot at the top and bottom. One man took hold of 
the knot at the head of the bed, the other of the 
knot at the bottom; they pulled it toward the 
stretcher ; the thing in the sheet, uplifted by both 
ends, sank toward the middle with a horrible, 
sickening bend. 

The cover fell to with a dull sound, and the two 
men, breathing heavily as after an effort, went off 
with a kind of satisfied wheeze, and the sound of 
their steps, swaying regularly under the heavy 
burden, slowly grew less and less till it died away 
in the distance. 

Barnier remained motionless. He continued gaz- 
ing at the same place, with eyes that seemed to see 
nothing. The curtains had been thrown up on each 
side of the tester, and the daylight could be seen 
through the empty bed. The blanket tossed across 
the iron bar at the foot of the bed hung down on 
straight lines to the floor The pillow and sheets 
lay in a heap on the ground, and the sun, striking 
on the faded and washed-out mattress which re- 
mained on the spring bed, showed the hollow im- 
print left by a body. 


WHATS TEJll MATTER WITH YOUf 


187 


CHAPTER XXXIX. 

“what’s the matter with you?” 

Great animation reigned in the president’s room 
that evening, for the house-students were giving a 
dinner to the out-students. There was loud discus- 
sion while the coffee was drank, and as the smoke 
rose from the first few pipes that were lighted, 
voices were raised to shouting pitch. At the mo- 
ment when the brandy, circulating from hand to 
hand to be poured into the coffee, was passed over 
Barnier's head, Barnier, who usually never touched 
it, seized the bottle and half -filled his empty cup. 

“The sisters! the sisters! Well, all I can say,” 
cried at this moment a small, shrill voice at the 
end of the table, “ is that I knew a woman who 
went to the hospital for her confinement, and they 
neglected her shamefully ; did not even keep her 
clean ! f All because she was not a married woman ! 
and that’s their charit^ And then you have only 
to notice the difference they make in a ward be- 
tween patients who confess and those who do not. 
It is all very fine, I don’t deny it, but do not make 
out the sisters better than they are. Why, good 
heavens ! there are plenty of ward-maids and men 
nurses who are as good or better than they, and no 
one says a word about them.” 


J88 


WHATS THE MATTER WITH YOU?" 


‘‘Oh! oh!” exclaimed several voices. 

“Come, out with it; make no bones about it. The 
sister of charity is a humbug; I prefer that,” said 
Barnier, and laying his pipe on his saucer he went 
on: 

“You rile me. It is too sutpid to run down those 
women, and to run them down here. Don’t we 
know them just as well as you ! Have you ever seen 
any here who have, as you say, neglected sf woman 
because she had not her marriage-lines? Ah! this 
is the great grudge you have against them — they 
cram the Almighty down the patients’ throats. To 
begin with, they do not do so very much cramming, 
after all ; we know that. And if they did, what 
then? Suppose they do try to bring a glimpse of 
Paradise into a hospital ward? What would you 
bring? Comparative philosophy? Well, I have 
read Voltaire as well as you. I am no bigot, but it 
seems to me idiotic to push one’s own opinions for- 
ward in affairs of this kind. What, d — n it ! here 
are women giving up everything in the world, liv- 
ing night and day in a hospital, working like drud- 
ges, growing old amid everything that is abomin- 
able! women who spend their lives in consoling 
the suffering, closing the eyes of the dying, and 
without having to sustain them all that we have — 
life outside these walls, zeal for science, ambition 
for fame or fortune, a career before us. On my 
honor, if you don’t call it grand, I don’t know what 
you would have. But take who you like, the first 


WHAT 8 THE MATTER WITH YOUr 189 

comer out of the street and set him down in a 
hospital ward to watch the sisters doing what they 
all do, dress the most loathsome and disgusting 
sores ... he would bare his head, because at the 
sight of such devotion as that, my dear fellow, you 
may wish to play the cynic ; but the heart pays 
homage — when there is one.” 

^‘The duse! you take it up warmly, Barnier!” 
returned the shrill voice. After all, my dear fel- 
low, it is easy to understand why you are so ex- 
cited. It is a personal question for you. You have 
your own reasons for defending the sisters.” 

‘‘Reasons? what reasons?” asked Barnier, empty- 
ing the brandy in his cup at one gulp. 

“Don’t play the innocent. You know them as 
well as I do. We are among comrades here; there 
need be no mystery.” 

“When you have quite finished,” said Barnier, 
resting his chin on his hand. 

“ Come, now ! On your honor, haven’t you been 
weaving a gentle romance for the last twelve 
months with the sister of your ward— Sister Philo- 
mene, by name?” 

Barnier shrugged his shoulders. “ I always did 
think you an ass, Pluvinel, but not such an ass as 
that!” 

“ After all, you may not be singed ; I know noth- 
ing about that ; but as to the sister ” 

“Shut up!” 

“As to the sister, she is caught. You have 


190 


**WHAT8 THE MATTER ITH TOUf 


turned the poor girl’s head. Women like that have 
so little to occupy their imagination.” 

“Pluvinel,” said Barnier, who lifted to his lips his 
now empty cup, “you are drunk.” 

“Why? Because I have seen what every one 
has seen — the sister fluttering round you like a moth 
round a candle, and gazing at you with such eyes ; 
in short, all the tricks of women when they are in 
such a plight? It is not worth while making such 
a pretense about it ; I am only telling you things 
that are now perfectly notorious. You are the 
only person who does not talk about it. It makes 
the very ward-maids gossip.” 

“You say the sister loves me?” 

The blood and the brandy began to mount to Bar- 
nier’s head, and amid his drunkenness a sudden 
gleam of light seemed to fall upon his memory. 
All kinds of unnoticed trifles, mere nothings that 
had not caught his attention during Romaine’s ill- 
ness, became clear and appeared to him as past 
events revealing themselves tardily in their true 
light. 

“Well, do you see it now?” 

“No,” replied Barnier, taking the bottle again 
from the table and pouring more brandy into his 
cup. 

“Ah! you don’t see it. Undoubtedly you are 
the soul of discretion. My compliments, my dear 
fellow.” 

“Pluvinel!” cried Barnier, “you are a bad man!” 


WHATS THE MATTER WITH TOUT 


191 


And changing his tone he began to laugh, looking 
at Pluvinel over the rim of his cup, which he 
emptied by little sips. 

‘‘Gentlemen,” began a voice. * 

“ Be quiet, over there ! Here is Pichenat giving 
a caricature of a chemical lesson from the cele- 
brated organopathe by the bedside of a patient.” 

^ “Gentlemen,” shouted Pichenat, seated by the 
empty bed at the end of the room, in the attitude 
of the eminent doctor by the patient’s bedside, “this 
is a question that I address to all ; to animists, 
solidists, vitalists, organicists, iatro-chemists, iatro- 
mathematicians, to all the iatros ! Monsieur 
Belard, examine the patient. He complains of 
a pain in the frontal bone, or rather the temporal 
bone. Well, Monsieur Belard, have you sounded? 
But how have you sounded? Come, sound 
again! Be seated, gentlemen; bring benches. 
And that is the way you sound, sir? But you skip! 
you have skipped over more than an inch. The 
diseased spleen is enlarged nearly half an inch on 
each side. From thence proceeds an unknown 
radiation half an inch on each side. Gentlemen, 
I tell you frankly I am indispensable to you ; I 
know it and you see it. If I were to die to-morrow, 
sounding without me would be the world without 
the psychatome. We must create - words, gentle- 
men, create words ; they resemble ideas. Ah ! how 
is this? And the patient who was in this bed last 
time— the poor man we had the grief to lose. No 


192 


WHATti TEE MATTER WITH TOUr 


one told me. ... It is incredible ! . . . Such an ex- 
traordinary case! So unfortunate! No notifica- 
tion of the necropsy was given me ! It is an un- 
heard-of want of respect to an organopathe like my- 
self!” 

The end of the parody was lost in the noise that 
all were making. The healths drank in every 
group, the brandy that circulated freely flew to all 
heads. At the table, where lay a pack of cards, 
play began for fabulous sums existing only in 
imagination. A student made drunk for the amuse- 
ment of the others began to be, as they said, a com- 
plete success. Two house-students solemnly con- 
versed together in a corner in low tones, and so ef- 
fusively that at every moment they might be seen 
taking off their spectacles to rub the glasses on 
their knees against the cloth of their trousers. 
Another was singing to himself the song traditional 
to all students of Bicetre : 

Dans ce Bicetre^ ou je m^emhete, 

Loin des plaisirs que je regrette, 

Paiivre reclns, j^ai souvent medite 
Sur la vieillesse et la caducite. * 

* In this Bicetre, where I am so bored, 

Far from the pleasures whose loss I deplored, 

A poor hermit am I, with no subject for thought 
Save how to grow old and decrepit you ought. 

Barnier, sunk in his chair, leaned his elbows on 
the table. His eyes throbbed, the muscles round 
his mouth had the nervous twitchings of drunken- 
ness, and he chewed rather than smoked a cigar- 


WHAT 8 THE MATTER WITH YOU?” 1^3 

stump, while he drank again from the cup into 
which he had poured more brandy. 

“ How you drink to-night. What is the matter 
with you?” said Malivoire. 

“I! nothing. I am thirsty, that’s all,” replied 
Barnier, shortly j and his glance falling upon the 
cards, he began, without opening his lips, to watch 
the cards flying hither and thither, and the players 
who contrived all to win at the same time. At the 
end of half an hour he found himself at Pluvinel’s 
side, and suddenly, as if just awoke, he said : “I 
say, Pluvinel, you know what you said to me — you 
are sure, Pluvinel? Then it is — it is really true 
that the sister has a fancy for me?” 

Pluvinel’s only reply was a shrug of the shoulders. 
Then Barnier, with his arm around his neck, drew 
Pluvinel nearer, and bending toward him, said in 
broken sentences : 

^‘You see ... I should like to ask you ... be 
cause you have evidently thought about the matter 
. . . you are older than we are, you know more of 
life, one can see that , in your face . . . Well, I 
want you to tell me ... if it has happened to you 
— you know, when ideas of this sort get into the 
brain, they don’t let one rest — to think of a nun. 
A body that is sacred, a dress that bears a bless- 
ing . . . something, I don’t know what, that in- 
spires awe like the robe of a priest, and yet that 
attracts like the dress of a woman ... I have seen 
pictures in books of nuns like that, with a man 


194 


WEATS THE MATTER WITH YOU?' 


kneeling in front of them ... I forgot in what 
stupid book. ... You are like me, Pluvinel, eh? 
There is a sacrilege in a love affair of that kind 
that is a temptation in itself. The vail . . . every 
thing. Keal forbidden fruit !” And Barnier’s eye 
gleamed. 

“Well, and what then?” said Pluvinel. 

“What then? Why, it is the hour for her round, 
and ITl just see ” and Barnier rose. 

“Come, Barnier, stay here. You are drunk. 
Stay here — you will do something foolish.” 

But Barnier, having staggered valiantly to his 
feet, was already across the threshold. He crossed 
the court-yard, ascended the stairs, and as he went 
into the first ward, saw Sister Philomene enter the 
dispensary alone. He followed her ; the little 
room, hot and close as a stove, sent a wave of fire 
mounting to his temples. The sister, with her back 
to him, was warming up a cold tisane. He seized 
her by her two arms, and drew her close to his lips. 
But the sister, with a supreme effort, wrenched 
her wrists away from the grasp that would detain 
her, and struck Barnier on the face. For a second 
he had a wild wish to return the blow, then he was 
frightened at himself. . . . He crossed the ward, 
went down stairs, and fell rather than seated him- 
self at the foot of the steps, on the wall surround- 
ing the patients’ airing-yard, and there, taking a 
handful of the snow on which he was seated, he 


WEATS THE MATTER WITH TOUf 


195 


passed it over his face. He was perfectly sober 
when he returned to the president’s room. 

“Well! ” said Pluvinel. 

“Well! the first man who ventures to speak of 
Sister Philomene otherwise than he would of his 
own dead mother — I’ll punch his head for him.” 


196 


BABNIEEii PENITENCE. 



CHAPTER XL. 
barnier’s penitence. 

^^The next morning Barnier awoke with a feeling 
' of disgust at himself. He was vaguely anxious, 
persecuted by the undefined feeling of dread that a 
base action leaves behind it. As the evening closed 
in he was astonished at not having been summoned 
before the committee. The following day he still 
expected to be sent for, but a whole week elapsed 
— the sister had made no complaint. 

^^_At times a guilty blush would pass across his 
cheek. Nothing in his own eyes could excuse his 
conduct. He did not love the sister— he had never 
even thought of loving her. No doubt he found a 


BABNIER’S PENITENCE. 


197 


certain pleasure in conversing with her. He en- 
joyed the short moments he spent in her little room 
with her, in the soft, luminous atmosphere which 
seemed filled with the sanctity of her presence. He 
had become accustomed to the sister’s voice, to her 
glance, to her person, her gestures, her intimacy, 
her angelic familiarity.7 But as he listened to her 
or watched her, not one of his thoughts had ever 
wandered further than the white gown which 
seemed to wrap her up in innocence and disguise 
the woman’s heart under the devotion of the nun.^ 
In the most confidential moments she had never 
been anything to him but a friend, and he did not 
suppose he had been anything more to her than a 
comrade. ^If he had made such an attempt, it had 
been in the madness of despair, under the fevered 
excitement of drink, as a man throws himself into 
any folly ; hopelessly, desperately, without even 
the wish to succeed, merely to be rid, at any cost, 
of poignant and haunting thought.^ 

^hen, little by little, he thought less of the sister; 
his mind returned to Romaine and his thoughts 
were only of her. (He remembered her first deser- 
tion of him, and how, in his determination to for- 
get and drown all recollection of her, he had 
plunged wildly into every kind of dissipation, scat- 
tering to the winds the shreds of his lacerated 
heart. On seeing her again at the hospital, he 
fancied he had met a mistress he had been expect- 
ing, and who, returning from a journey, had 


198 


BARNIERS PENITENCE. 


merely neglected to write^ Her forsaken condi- 
tion, the lovers she had had, all that had taken 
place since their last kiss — his love, on finding her, 
had forgotten all, and he had taken her back to 
his heart^ And now once more she had left him, 
and this time it was an eternal farewell, for she 
was dead And nothing remained to him but the 
recollection of her eyes, of her mouth, nothing save 
what the living senses can retain of a form that 
has vanished forever!"^ He longed to believe in 
something beyond death, in some future meeting 
beyond the tomb^ in some other existence. 

I^nd he absorbed himself Tn this idea of death, 
attracted toward it, dwelling on it, losing himself 
in the conten^lation of it as one’s vision is lost in 
empty space. ^Everything within him seemed to 
mourn for this womanT^ He felt himself seized and 
possessed of all kinds of gloomy, funereal, lugubri- 
ous ideas, which suffocated him but which he felt 
powerless to cast off. ) And he was so weak and 
helpless against these memories, which he inces- 
santly evoked and which ruthlessly haunted him 
that he took to drinking in order to place a barrier 
of drunkenness betwneen himself and the dead.^ 


A SZAV£ TO ABiSINTHR 


199 


CHAPTER XLI. 

A SLAVE TO ABSINTHE. 

fit was to ab sinth e that Barnier daily had re- 
course to drown his thoughts. He inevitably chose 
this liquor which, extracted from wormwood, from 
the root of angelica, from the calamus aromaticus, 
and the seeds of hadiane, lends an illusion similar 
to that which Asia and Africa derive from hemp, 
a magic excitement, mingling with the brutish 
drunkenness of the West the ideal raptures of 
oriental intoxication. Barnier was fascinated by 
this almost instantaneous intoxication, which 
seemed to rush and flow through his whole frame 
to his brain?) He was charmed by the immaterial, 
light, airy intoxication, which so gently bore him 
away in the arms of madness and oblivion.--v^ 

He poured the absinthe into the bottom of the 
glass, and the bitter aroma of intoxicating herbs 
arose. From on high he would let fall into it, drop 
by drop, the water that made it opaque, and stirred 
up the little clouds of white, opal, mother-of-pearl 
color. Then he would stop, again take up the bot- 
tle, again All the glass, and drink the green liquor 
like a liquid hashish. He drank and seemed to 
awake from a horrible nightmare. All his painful 
thoughts faded away and disappeared, as though 


200 


A SLAVE TO ABSINTHE. 


they had evaporated?) The dead woman was now 
transfigured into a shadowy image and memory en- 
veloped him with a rose-tinted shroud.^ He drank 
and reveled in the fevered hurrying of his blood, in 
the electricity that seemed to flash through him and 
All him with internal vibrations, with uncertain 
ideas that gayly traversed his brain, with the fresh 
activity that sped through all his moral and intellec- 
tual faculties.^ For the intoxication that took pos- 
session of him was not the intoxication of wine, it 
was no animal sensuality nor stupefying sensation ; 
it was more a sensibility which, without affecting 
him in body or externally, acted on the mysterious 
mental organs that make feeling become sensation. 

His mind, his imagination was volatilized, so to 
speak, and all that still reached his senses was 
poetized and transposed as in a dream. In this im- 
pulse and vague awakening to a new existence his 
soul laughed with an indescribable impression of 
comfort at a luminous something, just as a child 
^laughs at flowers round its cradle. His memory 
caught hold of some scrap of phrase and was lulled 
by it. Little by little his ideas lost shape, became 
more fluttering, more vague, softer and more dis- 
tant; and thus mere numbers would become 
harmonies. His head drooped in a lazy happiness ; 
and Barnier slept with his eyes open, in the torpor 
of a plant in a hot-house, with the satisfaction of a 
man lying under a ray of light on the border of 
dreamland. 


A SLAVE TO ABSINTHE. 


201 


^^The more Barnier lost himself in this unnatural 
existence, the more he sought its gratification, 
freedom, absence of thought, idle ecstasies; the 
more cruel was the awakening when he fell back 
on himself. Every day life became for him an in- 
supportable disenchantment. Ordinary sensations 
were insipid. The dullness and triviality of reality 
filled him with boundless ennui. He suffered under 
the low, gray sky of human life all that man shut 
up in a cellar, with a ray of sunlight passing under 
the door, would suffer. And with ennui memory 
returned.”^ 

.----Jntoxication thus became his real life, the life 
by the side of which the other was but wretched- 
ness, drudgery, a lie and a mystification, and he 
at last drew from absinthe even strength for his 
work. His intelligence appeared to him to grow 
and gain under its exciting influence ; he felt as 
though his brain, till then heavy and dimmed, were 
filled with a subtle gas. His comprehension had 
the vivacity and lucidity of second sight. What he 
had formerly sought for in vain now came at once 
to his mind. Problems were solved, and new hori- 
zons opened before him, and he found himself pos- 
sessed of a keenness and capacity of perception 
hitherto unknown.-^ 

It was not only his mind had appeared to gain 
energy in his constant fever ; his body, too, seemed 
to gain strength. His hand, like the hand of cer- 


202 


A SZAV£: TO ABSINTHE. 


tain engravers, steadied by drink, had never been 
more sure, more delicate, more cleverly daring in 
the small operations and the dressings belonging 
to his service. -- 


8IG2^ OF DEATH, 


203 


CHAPTER XLIL 

SIGN OF DEATH. 


Habit, however, soon deadened Barnier’s drunken 
felicity. What he drank no longer lifted him as 
rapidly out of grief and worry. He no longer felt 
himself transported into a world of sensations that 
renewed his whole being. CHe now only experienced 
the passing excitement that the fumes of drunken- 
ness sent rushing up to his brain, to disappear as 
rapidly and leave him stranded, just as the waves 
abandon a body which has been cast ashorer^ 

<He was obliged to increase the dose of poison^ 
Each day he drank a little more, doubling, treb- 
ling the dose, until he reached a point at which it 
would seem that absinthe would strike a man dead 
— drinking it as pure alcohol. Daily he sunk 
deeper and deeper into this abyss of artificial beati- 
tude in which he enjoyed the arrest of his senses 
and the numbness of his soul. What he demanded 
of this intemperance and what it gave him was no 
longer the excitement that had at first charmed 
him, but only the blissful listlessness that had suc- 
ceeded and blunted his first experiences. ^ And this 
enervating torpor that seemed to deprive him of all 
^power of will^ this ecstasy peopled with phantoms 
of ideas and swarming with images, this swaying 


204 


. SION OF DEATH. 


sensation that seemed to rock his thoughts in 
empty space, as in a hammock — all these returned 
with an ever-renewed sweetness and more volup- 
tuous bewilderment. (Drinking in this manner, he 
could not eat.^ Hunger no longer reminded him of 
the hours of meals^ His stomach seemed to reject 
all that was not the fiery liquid that devoured it.^ 
His companions in the surgeons’-room watched him 
as he lazily cut up his food, played with it, and left 
it on his plate. At first they had tried teasing him 
about it, but Barnier had answered them in so 
savage a way, in such brutal language, that he was 
speedily left alone and was hardly spoken to at 
table. (He did not get thin, however ; on the con- 
trary, he grew rather fat, but it was the unhealthy 
fat caused by exces^ Malivoire noticed that Bar- 
nier was getting into the habit of holding his thumb 
closed and bent under his fingers and he was 
alarmed at the appearance of this sign of death 
which he had so often observed in the dying^in 
a man whose symptoms showed so advanced a stage 
of drunkenness?^ 


“JKLX MTSFLFI’ 


206 


CHAPTER XLIII. 

“kill myself!” 

A' Bo you want to kill yourself?” said Malivoire, 
as Barnier mixed his sixth glass of absinthe. 

“Kill myself? kill myself?” and Barnier contempt- 
uously shrugged his shoulders by way of answer. 

/-—Malivoire, Barnier's great friend, was a young 
fellow who hid a cold and indifferent heart under a 
southern vivacity of gesticulation and an animated 
manner of speech. Nothing amused or diverted 
him, nothing captivated, shocked, or bored him. 
All passion, pleasure, or ambition left him indiffer- 
ent ; his was a curious nature, neither hot nor cold, 
that reminded one of the Chinese dish of fried ice. 
(fie was always ready for anything — to go to a ball 
if others wished ; to go to bed, if this were pre- 
ferred ; ready for a carousal if others were willing, 
ready to work, if they were so disposed, ready to 
fight if such were the order of the day ; as indiffer- 
ent to the one as the other, never taking the trouble 
to assert his will one way or another!^ 

— Tie was, however, neither a fool nor an unintel- 
ligent man; indeed, he was witty, of a mounte- 
bank style of wit, not wanting in humor or fun. 
But he was essentially and by vocation an imper- 
sonal being. Attracted to Barnier by the latter’s 


206 


^KILL MYSELF!' 


^^trong personality, }ie had become fond of him, and 
followed him like his shadow^ This friendship, 
the only sentiment Malivoire had which was not 
merely skin deep, his only devotion, had led to his 
comrades dubbing him with a nickname taken 
from hospital slang; they called him Barnier^s 
roupion henevole, after the probationers attached 
to a senior surgeon and authoriezd by him to wear 
the white apron and assist the house-surgeon as 
dresser. 

Barnier, on the contrary, with every appearance 
of coldness, with a thoughtful, concentrated, and 
intimidating countenance — Barnier was one of those 
impassioned natures who pass unnoticed by super- 
ficial observers, and who are only betrayed by the 
warmth of their glance, the mobility of their lips. 

(He was one of those nervous, bilious temperaments, 
in which intelligence and action combine, full of 
power of will, and in which a harmony of concep- 
tion and execution form the character.^ His intelli- 
gence, which was purely original, borrowing 
nothing from others, was thoroughly independent.”) 
file possessed the moral courage and perhaps over- 


exalted consciousness of his own personality— that 
is, in revolt against all conventional ideas; ideas 
that are received and imposed by the world in 
which one lives, by early education, by all that 


tends to clothe thought with a uniform livery ; \^nd 
such was the zeal of his intolerance for anything 
that to him appeared like a lie or hypocrisy ,")that he 


‘ZILi MYtiELFr 


207 


inveighed against the scientific sentimentality of 
Malivoire, and was seriously angered by his mania 
— affectation, indeed, of the new school of medicine 
— of hiding the terrifying nature of diseases under 
melodious euphonism^ 

— ^Accustomed to give way to this expansive, strong, 
and imperious personality, mastered by the in- 
dividuality of this comrade, whom he felt fitted to 
carry through any idea or determination he chose, 
Malivoire had little power to wrench from Barnier’s 
hands the glass from which he drank brutalization. 
He tried, however ; he strove to stop him by threats 
and supplications. Barnier let him run on, shrug- 
ged his shoulders — and drank.^-.,^ 


208 


ALARMED. 


CHAPTER XLIV. 

ALARMED. 

'-'At one moment, however, Barnier paused in his 
downward career. 

Amid the profound discouragement of the life into 
which he had fallen, in the midst of the grief that 
had made him loathe the ordinary cravings of his 
heart, and a cowardly shrinking from duty, Bar- 
nier had retained all his pride of intellect; am- 
bition, surviving everything else, still throbbed 
within him, just as in a body the last' throb of the 
heart is felt even when life has quitted all other 
organs. He wanted to obtain the house-surgeons’ 
gold medal, the highest honor, which is the desire, 
temptation, and dream of all house-surgeons. He 
failed at an examination, complaints were being 
made at the hospital about his negligence, and he 
understood that the medal, which till then even his 
comrades admitted he had a right to expect, would 
not be his.^<[Tie vexation roused him. He looked 
into himself, and the examination revealed a state 
which startled him. He found his intelligence 
heavy and numbed ; his faculty for comprehension, 
at first stimulated by drink, had become slow, idle, 
almost lifeless, and required to be pu|; in action, an 
effort that cost immense fatigue. ( His memory 


ALARMED. 


209 


failed him'^ to remember and retain anything for a 
day or twd now required an intense and persistent 
effort of will. ) In his discussions with his com- 
panions, he felt astonished, humiliated, and alarmed 
-—he, a precise and syllogistic mind, at his confusion, 
want of logic, and the clumsy vagueness of his 
arguments.'l He listened to himself as he talked ; 
his speech was no longer the enunciation of a clear 
thought ; a congestion of images, a flood of sensa- 
tions assailed him, leaving him no time to cast his 
words into phrases, in a grammatical form ; they 
gushed out in substantives no longer connected by 
verbs.^ His diffuse, scattered ideas no longer 
grouped themselves ; the thread of reasoning was 
broken in his brain. He still was capable of a witty 
repartee; but the connecting link between what he 
said and what he had said no longer existed. { He 
would hesitate, stop in the middle of a conversation 
or a narrative, like a pianoforte player who finds 
on the key-board a missing note."^ In this recogni- 
tion and self-avowal he also found himself embit- 
tered, his nerves impatient, and his temper aggres- 
sive and quarrelsome."^ He recognized that he was 
worried and tormented by irresistible impulses to 
contradict and say unkind things, to surly irrita- 
bility and unfair judgments, which, awakened in 
him by the abuse of absinthe, little by little drove 
away all his companions.') At the bottom of this 
degradation and downfall his personality itself ap- 
peared to him to have become the prey of a base 


210 


ALARMED. 


and vile passion ; he felt ashamed at finding himself 
devoid of energy and impulse, without the habitual 
courage that prompted his actions.) At each mo- 
ment and on every subject he was seized with ir- 
resolution, an abject moral faltering that deadened 
even his power of indignation, and in the place of 
his former generous though touchy individuality, 
his bold personality, his sincere, free, and valiant 
mind, he found only passive indifferenceT) 
(^Physically, the ravages were still more startling ; 
and Barnier could detect in himself the symptoms 
he had read of — the diminution of muscular tone, 
weakness in the legs, and sometimes in the morning 
a slight vermicular trembling of the tongue. 

Then, seized with a horrible dread, experienced 
by young medical students who, ever pondering 
over the diseases they are studying, seeking in them- 
selves for the complaint that horrifies them, Barnier 
dwelt terror-struck on his illness; and his first 
thoughts rushing off to the most terrifying examples 
science had offered him, he foresaw the abominable 
expiation demanded by alcoholism, in which the 
blood is already corrupted in the arteries three 
months before death ensues. (He bethought him 
with horror of those dreadful dead, who had left 
to the grave but half its work to do. ^ 


THE CONSTANT STRUGGLE. 


211 


CHAPTER XLV. 

THE CONSTANT STRUGGLE. 

a conflict arose in Barnier between habit 
and will. He struggled with his passion and strove 
to wrench himself from it. He passed through the 
anguish and anxiety, the supreme efforts, the pain- 
ful victories, the desperate cowardices that at last 
destroy all energy and weaken a man by constant 
shocks, so that he is left helpless and hesitating to 
face all the temptations of his discomfort, the fatal 
inspirations of a worn-out judgment, the longing 
for flnal rest.'^The anguish and uncertainty of the 
struggle exasperated his irritability. He grew 
morose and gloomy. He gave utterance to the bit- 
terness he felt, in words the irony of which con- 
cealed his despair.] On the days he would not give 
way and was able to resist drink his blighted life, 
his ruined career, his shattered health, his weakened 
intellect, a future which he could not calmly con- 
template, all rose up before him and crushed him.") 
On those days the thought of Romaine haunted!^ 
him, and it seemed as if her shadow were near him, 
like a woman waiting on the threshold of an open 
door. ‘ 

He tried to wear out by physical fatigue these 


212 


THE CONSTANT STRUGGLE. 


temptations and visions ; he walked for hours about 
Paris, through quarters of the town that he did not 
even see as he passed through them, elbowed by 
crowds that he did not feel, going on and on straight 
before him till he found no pavement under his 
feet; and when he returned and sat down to din- 
ner in the president’s room, he bore on his face the 
traces of that utter lassitude(which in one day ages 
a man more than a yeaE^ 


PHILOMENE’S INQUIRY, 


213 


CHAPTER XLVL 


PHILOMENE’S INQUIRY 


One day that Malivoire was replacing Barnier in 
his work he was struck by the pallor and emaciated 
appearance of Sister Philomene, and he could not 
help saying to her how altered she was and had 
been for some time past. 

“Yes, it is true,” replied the sister, “but every- 



body changes. I am not so much altered as Mon- ^ 
sieur Barnier, however. I am told he is killing 
himself with drink. Has he no friends to warn 
him?” 


214 


THOUGHTS OF THE FAST. 


CHAPTEK XLVII. 

THOUGHTS OF THE PAST. 

The sister was indeed very much altered. In her 
wasted countenance her large eyes had the sickly 
smile of an invalid. The happy state of her mind 
was no longer to be seen in her face. Her smile 
had lost its playfulness, and when she made an ef- 
fort to recover herself, when, by the bedside of a 
patient, she strove and succeeded in being cheerful, 
after a very few minutes she suddenly felt her 
assumed mirth forsake her. She had no longer 
the spirit necessary to dispense those invigorating 
cordials of charity, hope and confidence in God, 
which she formerly offered her patients so freely 
and in such abundance. She no longer felt the 
winged strength that formerly bore her from bed 
to bed. 

Never, however, had she busied herself more with 
her patients *, never had she so worked, walked, 
wearied her body by going and coming and her zeal 
by excessive devotion. Her days, her nights, her 
whole life were but one continual sacrifice, and it 
might have been thought she wished to push to the 
extreme limits of her courage the accomplishment 
of her duties, so eagerly did she seek out the hard- 
est, the most repulsive and humiliating tasks, so 


THOUGHTS OF THE PAST 


215 


jealous was she to suffer all the trials of the 
hospital. 

When, in the night that had preceded Romaine’s 
entry into the hospital, Sister Philomene had awoke 
from the dream of her senses— from the half- 
vanished dream which still made her whole body 
quiver — she had thrown herself on her knees, half- 
dressed, in her cell, and until the four o’clock bell 
had remained in prayer on the cold tiles, immersed 
in a sentiment of fear and painful anxiety ; deeply 
disturbed without, however, understanding why, 
without a thought of love crossing her candid and 
ingenuous heart. 

She had spent the whole day in self-examination 
and interrogation, face to face with her conscience. 
By degrees, as she searched her thoughts, she had 
been struck by the resemblance of what she had 
believed, of what she still believed to be an allow- 
able affection, a sweet friendship-f'with love, or, 
at least, with the idea that the little she had read 
in books made her conceive was love. ; Looking 
back, she recalled to memory the course of the 
preceding months, from the first time Barnier had 
sat down beside her in her closet, when he occupied 
the chair now before her. She remembered the 
pleasure she took in their little chats, in which she 
lost sight of self and the flight of time. She ad- 
mitted the secret joy, the deep and intimate joy 
she felt at being praised by the house-surgeon, the 
excitement, emulation, and fervor that his com- 


216 


THOUGHTS OF THE PAST. 


mendation had lent to her charity and devotedness. 
Searching deeply and scrutinizing the agreeable 
and disagreeable sensations she had experienced on 
different occasions from Barnier’s words, which, 
without doubt, ought to have had no effect upon 
her, she paused for a moment, staggered, as at 
some discovery, by all the feelings these words had 
created and raised in her of resolves, bitterness, 
joys, and desires; terrified at the impression they 
had made on her, and at the length of time they 
had remained silent in her mind and heart."^ In all 
the past, which her memory conjured up with vivid 
freshness, she recalled her grief when she thought 
herself about to leave the ward, her anxiety while 
uncertain as to her destination, her joy and relief 
when it had been decided to maintain her in her 
place ; and she asked herself if it was indeed only 
that ward and those patients that she had been so 
sorry to quit and so happy to remain with, (^t the 
same time, she remembered her joy on learning 
that Barnier was to be allowed to pass the third 
year of his studentship in the same hospital, and 
the void, the singular void she had felt in her exis- 
tence during the surgeon’s month’s holiday. > And 
following up her train of thought, she recalled 
thousands of details, petty circumstances, which 
she had not heeded at the time.^ She reproached 
herself with the indulgence and toleration with 
which she had allowed the young surgeon to speak 
on all subjects; the timidity she felt in contradict- 


THOUGHTS OF THE FAST 


217 


ing him ; the passive, almost complacent, attention 
she had lent to his attacks on religion ; the laughter 
and jokes she had opposed to his impious remarks, 
which from any other would have roused her in- 
dignation. And at all these indications, all these 
symptom^ of an attachment that was no doubt, 
culpable, opening her eyes in a confused way, and 
yet still a prey to uncertainty, she had resolved to 
speak to her confessor on the subject and ask to 
change wards, 

L . Komaine’s arrival at the hospital, the change the 
sister had felt in herself, the outburst and sudden 
revelation of her love by the tortures of jealousy, 
the effort, the superhuman effort she had required 
during the evening prayer to stifle the hatred of 
the woman under the pity of the Christian;) and 
crave God’s mercy for the dying creature beloved 
by Barnier; then the scene in which, flying from 
Barnier’s kiss,\ahe had felt herself so weak at heart 
that she had summoned up violence to her help- 
all this flashing, tearing, rending, and enlighten- 
ing her conscience, had changed her resolutions. 

(Ashamed and startled at herself, hating her weak- 
ness and this attachment, in which she saw but sin, 
she had chosen her own penance?^ She had not 
spoken; she had conflded nothing to her confessor; 
she had not asked to change wards ; she had im- 
posed on herself the duty of remaining, repenting, 
and suffering and expiating there where she had 
loved, there where she still loved. ^ She had deter- 


218 


THOUGHTS OF THE FAST. 


mined to remain in the daily temptation of that 
man’s presence, in order to have more grief to van- 
quish, and at every moment mercilessly to punish 
her senses and her heart by the incessant torture of 
remorse and the craving of her love'!^ She would 
have wished this love to have lain on her heart 
like a hair-shirt, rubbing ceaselessly on her wound.^ 
And the crucifixion of her heart did not suffice 
for her ; she also martyrized her fiesh by tortures 
hidden under her robe, all kinds of macerations 
that she drew from stories of martyrs. And each 
day, growing paler and thinner, she saw, not with- 
out a secret joy, her health giving way; it was the 
trappings of her body she offered up as a sacrifice 
to God. 


ASKING F0BGIVENE88. 


219 


CHAPTER XLVIII. 


ASKING FORGIVENESS. 

^^The days on which Barnier still put in an ap- 
pearance at the Sainte Therese ward the sister did 
not shun him, she merely kept him at a distance 
by an icy manner. She put him aside like a 
stranger, avoided the least thing that might draw 
them together, and evaded every occasion of speech 
or interchange of words, that was not absolutely 
exacted by her duties. For some days Barnier had 
been hovering about her, seeking an opportunity 
of meeting her; but the sister had always managed 
to avoid him by never being alone, placing some un- 
der nurse or patient as a third person between 
them. At last, one day, at the end of the surgeon’s 
round, Barnier, watching a moment when she was 
alone, managed to say to her : 

Sister Philomene, I humbly ask your forgive- 
ness, and beg you to let me hear from your own lips 
that you have forgiven me.”x^-^^ 

-''-The sister listened to his voice, surprised at the 
emotion it betrayed. She turned to Barnier with a 
gentle and sad look, her lips parted to speak ; but 
her heart was too full, and she passed silently be- 
fore the surgeon, went into her closet, and closed 
the door after her. . 


220 


MATERIALISM. 


CHAPTER XLIX. 

MATERIALISM. 

^That day, at about four o’clcok, Barnier and 
Mali voire were leaving the establishment at 
Clamart where he had been dissecting a body. He 
went out by the little green door and down three 
steps. 

“We are going to walk home, are we not?” asked 
Malivoire, puffing at his pipe. 

“Just as you please.” 

They started off along the pavement by the side 
of the little, low garden wall, overtopped by the 
roof of the amphitheater and its four glass lanterns. 
The smell of a tan-yard filled the air. To the left 
the smoke of a factory chimney sent up white puffs 
into the gray sky. As they turned down the Rue 
du Fer-a-Moullin : 

“Isay, Barnier,” remarked Malivoire “do you 
know that to-day is the 20th of December, and I 
would give something to be in your place?” 

“Why?” 

“Why? Because in ten days you will have ended 
your four years’ house-surgeonship. And you will 
be able to bid adieu to the hospital — wretched 
place,” said Malivoire, as he pointed to the black 
walls of the Hospital de la Pitie they were just 


MATERIALISM. 


221 


passing. ‘‘You will begin practice on your own 
account, you will be started in life, and with a lit- 
tle luck. ... By the way, have you hired any 
rooms?” 


“No.” 

"-^.^“What! you have not yet taken any? How 
absurd! Well, I seel must do the necessary for 
you. I will look'out for some in a district — a com- 
mercial and well-to-do district — something near the 
Bourse; that is central, and we will settle you 
down comfortably. Come, let us see, what will 
you require. A small anteroom, a little drawing- 
room for the patients to wait in, and a study, not 
very high up, on account of the invailds. The 
drawing-room must have a light, cheerful paper, 
a sofa, and arm-chairs. Hang it ! I saw just the 
furniture you will want sold last week at an auction. 
Well, the furniture must have covers of white and 
pink striped satinette. You must hang up a few 
lithographs by Hamon. On the table, a Turkish 
table cover and some serious books — you can easily 
buy a few old volumes. You understand, the client 
who comes to consult is more or less depressed ; 
your reception-room must have a reassuring 
aspect. The consulting-room — oh ! there every- 
thing must be austere. I advise carved oak furni- 
ture. On the mantel-piece, a set of Colas’ bronze 
ornaments; that is indispensable, my dear fellow, 
and the traditional engraving— ^Hippocrates refus- 
ing the presents of Artaxerxes,\ and the other that 


222 


MATEBIALISM. 


^oes with it; they can’t hurt. I bet you would 
take an apartment without two exits, poor in- 
nocent, if I were not there to help you.” 

^From the Rue Geoifroy-Saint-Hilaire they had 
turned into the Rue Saint Victor. The houses were 
closer together, low and filthy, with small windows 
stuck like holes in the dirty plaster. Barnier and 
Malivoire passed in front of low pot-houses with 
grimy window-panes and black parlors, before 
green-grocers’ shops where, under low doors, 
bloaters lay pell-mell with apples; before cook- 
shops that displayed a stale piece of roast veal be- 
tween empty bottles. Next to a hucksters’ that 
filled up half the entry to an alley, was a wine-shop 
with a grating painted red, behind which could be 
seen heaps of potatoes. Then came a kind of 
second-hand grocery store, with barrels of moldy 
plums ; then a small hosiers’, filled with the thick 
knitted vests that the working class use in winter ; 
a library of trumpery books, with a window on the 
ground floor crammed full of ha’penny ballads, and 
a hair-dresser’s shop-front, in which the ashen wax 
heads had orange-red cheeks/^/ 

— ^ little before they reached the Place Maubert 
stood a half pulled down house, with a large wall 
still erect, on which was visible the frame-work 
of the former dwellings, with its lines of ceilings, 
floorings, landings, fire-places, and the black streaks 
of chimneys, the wall-papers of the rooms still 
greasy where heads had rested. 


MATEBIALISM. 


223 


a house like that could say all it has seen of 
suffering!” muttered Barnier, thinking aloud, as he 
vaguely gazed at those six stories of misery shown 
forth to the light of day. 

‘‘And your thesis, Barnier?” asked Malivoire. 
“It is not an easy subject you have chosen — The 
Anastomosis of the Superior Cervical Ganglion.”-—^ 

“ No, I am not going to do that. I have changed 
my mind.” 

“And you have decided on ” 

“On death.” 

“Ah! really.” 

N(‘Yes. ITl tell you my idea. I want to prove 
that natural death, which was the death of man in 
primitive days, and which is his proper death — 
natural death in fact no longer exists. In our 
modern existence every one dies by accident. (^Life 
is not used up, it breaks^ ^t is a suicide more or 
less slow.”.'-v^ 

“You are still a materialist, I hope?” 

“ Of course ! The soul is a great impediment in 
scientific questions.” And Barnier said this last 
phrase in a tone that puzzled Malivoire. 

“Let us take a cab; there’s one,” continued Bar- 
nier, making a sign to a passing driver. 

“It is hardly worth while now. What is the 
matter with you? You are trembling.” 

“I feel a kind of shiver.” 

dear fellow, I am sure it’s your disgusting 
absinthe that gives you the feeling. It acts as a 


224 


MATEHIALISM, 


whip-up, just as gin does to the Englishy Ko, it 
is really too provoking of you ; you really ought not 
to go on drinking.” 

ell, I promise I will leave off drinking, 
Malivoire. But don’t speak to me any more about 
it; it worries me.” And Barnier cowered back in 
a corner of the cab. 

When they reached the hospital, Barnier went up 
’ to bed. 


DYING. 


225 



CHAPTER L. 

DYING. 

— ^he next morning the whole hospital knew that 
Barnier, having scratched his hand on the previous 
day while dissecting a body in a state of purulent 
infection, was dying in terrible agonies. 

When at four o’clock Malivoire, quitting for a 
few moments the bedside of his friend, came to re- 
place him in the service, the sister went up to him. 
She followed from bed to bed, dogging his steps, 
without, however, accosting him, without speak- 
ing, watching him intently, with her eyes fixed on 
his. As he was leaving the ward : 


226 


DYING. 


“Well?” she asked, in the brief tone with which 
women stop the doctor on his last visit at the 
threshold of the room. 

^‘No hope,” said Mali voire, with a gesture of de- 
spair, “ there is nothing to be done. It began at his 
right ankle, went up the leg and thigh, and has 
attacked all the articulations. Such agonies, poor 
fellow; it will be a mercy when it’s over.” 

“ Will he be dead before night?” asked the sister, 
calmly. 

“ Oh, no ! He will live through the night. It is 
the same case as that of Raguideau three years ago ; 
and Raguideau lasted forty-eight hours. 


WHAT m IT YOU WANTr 


227 



CHAPTER LI. 

^‘WHAT IS IT YOU WANT?” 
evening, at ten o’clock, Sister Philomene 
might be seen entering the church of Notre-Dame- 
des-Victoires. 

The lamps were being lowered, the lighted tapers 
were being put out one by one with a long-handled 
• extinguisher. The priest had just left the vestry. 

The sister inquired where he lived, and was told 
that his house was a couple of steps from the church 
in the Rue de la Banque. 

The priest was just going into the house when 
she entered behind, pushing open the door he was 
closing. 


228 


WHAT IS IT YOU V/ANTr 


‘‘Come in, sister,” he said, unfurling his 'we« um- 
brella and placing it on the tiled floor in the ante- 
room. And he turned toward her. She was on 
her knees. “What are you doing, sister.^” he said, 
astonished at her attitude. “Get up, my child. 
This is not a flt place. Come, get up.” 

“You will save him, will you not?” and Philo- 
mene caught hold of the priest’s hands as he 
stretched them out to help her to rise. “ Why do 
you object to my remaining on my knees?” 

“ Come, come, my child, do not be so excited. It 
is God alone, remember, who can save. I can but 
pray.” 

“Ah! you can only pray,” she said, in a disap- 
pointed tone. “Yes, that is true.” 

And her eyes sank to the ground. After a mo- 
ment’s pause the priest went on: 

“Come, sister, sit down there. You are calmer 
now, are you not? Tell me, what is it you want?” 

“He is dying,” said Philomene, rising as she 
spoke. “He will probably not live through the 
night,” and she began to cry. “It is fora young 
man of twenty -seven years of age ; he has never 
performed any of his religious duties, never been 
near a church, never prayed to God since his first 
communion. He will refuse to listen to anything. 
He no longer knows a prayer even. He will listen 
neither to priest nor any one. And, I tell you, it is 
all over with him, he is dying. Then I remembered 
your confraternity of Hotre-Dame-des-Victoires, 


^^WHAT IS IT YOU WANT?' 


229 


since it is devoted to those who do not believe. 
Come, you must save him!” 

“ My daughter ” 

. And perhaps he is dying at this very mo- 
ment. Oh I promise me you will do all at once, all 
that is in the confraternity book; the prayers, 
everything, in short. You will have him prayed 
for at once, won’t you?” 

“But, my poor child, it is Friday to-day, and the 
confraternity only meets on Thursday.” 

“ Thursday only ; why? It will be too late Thurs- 
day. He will never live till Thursday. Come, you 
must save him; you have saved many another.” 

Sister Philomene looked at the priest with wide- 
opened eyes, in which, through her tears, rose a 
glance of revolt, impatience, and command.^* For 
one instant in that room there was no longer a sis- 
ter standing before a priest, but a woman face to 
face with an old man._^. 

The priest resumed : 

“ All I can do at present for that young man, my 
daughter, is to apply to his benefit all the prayers 
and good works that are being carried on by the 
confraternity, and I will offer them up to the 
blessed and immaculate Heart of Mary to obtain 
his conversion. I will pray for him to-morrow at 
mass, and again on Saturday and Sunday.” 

“Oh, I am so thankful,” said Philomene, who felt 
, /Tears rise gently to her eyes as the priest spoke to 
her. “How I am full of hope ; he will be converted, 


230 


HAT IS IT YOU WANTr 


he will have pity on himself. Give me your bless- 
ing for him.” 

sister, I only bless from the altar, in the 
pulpit, or in the confessional. There only am I 
the minister of God. Here, my sister, here I am 
but a weak man, a miserable sinner.” 

“That does not signify; you are always God’s 
minister, and you cannot, you would not refuse 
me ; he is at the point of death.” 

She fell on her knees as she spoke. The priest 
blessed her, and added : 

“It is nearly eleven o’clock, sister; you have 
nearly three miles to get home, all Paris to cross at 
this late hour.” 

Oh, lam not afraid,” replied Philomene, with 
a smile; “God knows why I am in the street. 
Moreover, I will tell my beads on the way. The 
Blessed Virgin will be with me.” 


THE DEATH-RATTLE. 


231 



CHAPTER LII. 

THE DEATH-RATTLE. 


—The same evening, Barnier, rousing himself from 
a silence that had lasted the whole day, said to 
Mali voire, ‘^You will write to my mother. You 
will tell her that this often happens in our profes- 
sion.” 

“ But you are not as bad as all that, my dear fel- 
low,” replied Malivoire, bending over the bed. ‘‘I 
am sure I shall save you.” 

I chose my man too well for that. How 
well I took you in, my poor Malivoire!” and he 
smiled almost. “You understand, I could not kill 
myself. I did not wish to be the death of my old 
mother. But an accident — that settles everything. 
You will take all my books, do you hear, and my 
case of instruments also. I wish you to have all. 
You wonder why I have killed myself, don’t you? 


232 


THE DEATH-BATTLE. 


Come nearer. It is on acccount of that woman. I 
never loved but her in all my life. They did not 
give her enough chloroform ; I told them so. Ah ! 
if you had heard her scream when she awoke — be- 
fore it was over ! That scream still re-echoes in 
my ears! However,” he continued, after a nervous 
spasm, “if I had to begin again, I would choose 
some other way of dying, some way in which 1 
should not suffer so much. Then, you know, she 
died, and I fancied I had killed her. She is ever 
before me, .... covered with blood. . . . And 
then I took to drinking. I drank because I loved her 
still. . . . That’s all!”- 

Barnier relapsed into silence. After a long pause, 
he again spoke and said to Malivoire : 

“You will tell my mother to take care of the lit- 
tle lad.” 

After another pause, the following words escaped 
him: 

“The sister would have said a prayer.” 

Shortly after, he asked : 

“What o’clock is it?” 

“Eleven.” 

“ Time is not up yet, ... I have still some hours 
to live. ... I shall last till to-morrow.” 

A little later he again inquired the time, and 
crossing his hands on his breast, in a faint voice he 
called Malivoire and tried to speak to him. But 
Malivoire could not catch the words he muttered. 

Then the death-rattle began and lasted till morn. 


THE LOCK OF HAIK, 


233 



CHAPTER LIIL 

THE LOCK OF HAIR. 

— A candle lighted up the room. 

It burned slowly, it lighted up the four white 
walls on which the coarse ochre paint of the door 
and of the two cupboards cut a sharp contrast. 
One of the open cupboards displayed books crowded 
and piled up on its shelves ; on the other was an 
earthen jug and basin. Over the chimney, painted 
to imitate black marble, a petrified Gorgone leaf 
hung in the middle of the empty panel. In one 
corner, where the paint was worn by scratching 
matches, was a little glass framed in gilt paper, a 
souvenir of some excursion in the neighborhood of 
Paris, The curtainless windows revealed a roof, 


234 


TEE LOCK OF HAIR. 


and black darkness beyond. It was the counterpart 
of a room of some inn in the suburb of a great 
city. 

On the iron bedstead, with its dimity curtains, 
a sheet lay thrown over a motionless body, molding 
the form as wet linen might do, indicating with the 
inflexibility of an immutable line the rigidity, from 
the tip of the toes to the sharp outline of the face, 
of what it covered. 

Near a white wooden table Malivoire, seated in a 
large wicker arm-chair, watched and dozed, half- 
slumbering and yet not quite asleep. 

In the silence of the room nothing could be heard 
but the ticking of the dead man’s watch. 

From behind the door something seemed gently 
to move and advance, the key turned in the lock 
and Sister Philomene stood beside the beef) With- 
out looking at Malivoire, without seeing him, she 
knelt down and prayed in the attitude of a kneeling 
marble statue and the folds of her gown 
were as motionless as the sheet that covered the 
dead man. , 

^At the end of a quarter of an hour she rose, 
walked away without once looking round, and dis- 
appeared. 

The next day, awaking at the hollow sound of the 
"CDflin knocking against the narrow stairs, Mali- 
voire vaguely recalled the night’s apparition, and 
wondered if he had dreamed it; and going 
mechanically up to the table by the bedside, he 


THE LOCK OF HAIR. 


235 


sought for the lock of hair he had cut off for Bar- 
nier’s mother-£^e lock of hair had vanished. 


[the end.] 



m 


uE 




An Entrancing Emotional Story, 

By BERTHA M. OLAY. 

No. I Of tlio Primrose Edition of Copyright Novels. 


Price, Cloth/$l; Paper, 50 Cents. 


SOME OPINIONS OP THE PEESS. 

Messrs. Street & Smith, New York, begin a now series of novels— “The 
Primrose Library”— with “Another Man’s Wife,” by Bertha M. Clay. The 
Story has enough plot to keep one from falling asleep over it, and it also In- 
dicates the stumbling-blocks and pitfalls which abound everywhere for 
young husbands and wives who think so much about having “a good time” 
that they have no time left in which to think about reputation and 
character. — N, Y, Herald, Sept. 10. 

Street & Smith publish the American copyright novel, “Another Man’s 
Wife,” by Bertha M. Clay. It deals with certain corrupting influences of 
fashionable society, and impressively warns of the dangers that spring 
from them. Its plot is strong and dramatic, and is elaborated with all of 
the qualities of style that have made the author so popular. It is the first 
Issue of the new Primrose Series . — Boston Globe, Sept. 16. 

“Another Man’s Wife,” by Bertha M. Clay, Street & Smith’s Primrose 
Series, is a laudable effort toward the repression of the growing evil of 
matrimonial disloyalty. The book is handsomely bound, with a holiday 
look about Brooklyn Eagle, Sept. 15, 

Street & Smith of New York publish in cloth cover “Another Man’s 
Wife,” by Bertna M. Clay. The story is effective. It impressively depicts 
the results certain to attend the sins of deception. It teaches a lesson that 
will not be lost upon those thoughtless men and women who, only intent 
opon pleasure, little dream of the pitfall before them, and to which they are 
blind until exposure wrecks happiness . — Troy (N, Y.) Press. 

Street & Smith, New York, have brought out in hook-form “Another 
Man’s Wife.” This is one of Bertha M. Clay’s most effective storiea.— 
Cincinnati Enqtiirer, 

“Another Man’s Wife.” This is one of Bertha M. Clay’s most effectire 
Btorles. It forcibly and impressibly portrays the evils certain to attend 
matrimonial deceit, clandestine interviews, and all the tricks and device* 
which imperil a wife’s honor. It has a novel and entrancingly interesting 
and abounds in vivid and dramatic incidents. It is the first issue o« 
Street Smith’s Primrose Edition of Copyright Novels, and will not appeal 
atoewbere.—AWoOcMM Freerngn, 



PRIMROSE EDITION 

JSTo. 2 . 


THE 

Belle of the Season, 

By Mrs. HARRIET LEWIS, 

zs an intensely interesting story ^ and written in the 
best style of the gifted author. The large sales 
of this book are sufficient proof of its merit., 
and it is recommended to all lovers of 
first-class literature. 


The Belle of the Season. — This is a gracefully told love story, by 
Mrs. Harriet Lewis, abounding in dramatic action and extremely capti- 
vating incidents, The plot is a marvel of ingenuity, not at all extra- 
vagant, and the love scenes are very spiritedly depicted. The reader 
must admire the adroit manner in which the hero and heroine, after 
enumerable trials, temptations, and misunderstandings, overcome all 
obstacles to their union, and recognize each other’s worth. There is 
an underplot of deep interest which entrances the charm of romance, 
and every chapter developes novel and unexpected features. The 
Belle of the Season is one of Mrs. Lewis’ most entrancing works, 
and is likely to have a large sale . — Pittsburg Leader. 


For sale by aU Booksellers and Newsdealers, or will be sent, postage 
FREE, to any address in the United States or Canada, on receipt of 
price, 50 cents, by the publishers, 

STREET & SMITH, 

P. 0. Box 2734. 26 to 31 Rose Streetj New York. 


PKIMEOSE EDITION 



KatMeen Douglas, 


By JULIA TRUITT BISHOP, 


is a pure and beautifully written love story. It is 
talked of by press and public alike ^ and 
is the sensation of the day. 


Kathleen Douglas. — Like the plot of an artfully constructed play 
is this cleverly told romance, by Julia Truitt Bishop, of love and mys- 
tery. It is the story of a cruelly suspected yet innocent wife, against 
whom suspicions are aroused and disseminated by a rejected wooer — a 
man with the outward semblance of a saint, yet who conceals the 
heart of an insatiate wretch. The interest is heightened and artisti- 
cally sustained by making tpo daughter an inheritor of her mother’s 
supposed disgrace. The golden thread of a pleasing love episode is 
intertwined with the tragic element of the romance, and from the 
opening to the close the reader never loses sight of the heroine, the long- 
suffering but eventually rewarded Kathleen Douglas . — Baltimore News. 


For sale by all Booksellers and Newsdealers, or will be sent, postage 
iTBEE, to any address in the United States or Canada, on receipt of 
price, 50 cents, by the publishers, 


STREET cS: SMITH, 

25 to 31 Rose Street, New York. 


P. 0. Box 2734, 


PKIMKOSE EDITION 

iNTo. 5. 


Lover, 

By ARY ECILAW, 

zs a story of thrilling interest. The scenes are 
very dramatically drawn and the characters 
graphically portrayed. 



Hee Koyal Lovee. — This is an admirable translation of a fascinating 
romance from the French, by Aet Ecilaw. It appeals especially to 
wives who aim to attract admiration, and to husbands who are so 
jealous that “trifles light as air” often disturb the serenity of the 
household. It brings the heroine close to the verge of disaster ; it is 
so artfully woven that the persistent secret wooer is on the eve of being 
rewarded for his duplicity ; and the maddened husband is about to be 
humiliated, when, lo ! utterly unexpected events expose rascality and 
vindicate the imprudent but faithful wife. The storj’^ is vigorously and 
dramatically narrated, with many strong situations, and never lags ir 
action. — Chronicle. 


For sale by all Booksellers and Newsdealers, or will be sent, postage 
FREE, to any address in the United States or Canada, on receipt of 
price, 50 cents, by the publishers, 

STREET & SMITH, 

P. 0. Box 2734. 25 to 31 Rose Street, New York. 



JULIA EDWARDS’ 

COPYRIGHT NOVELS 

XXJ- 

The Select Series. 


Price, 25 Cents Each. Fully Illustrated. 


No. 30-PBETTIEST OP ALL. 

No. 35-THE LITTLE WIDOW. 

No. 38-BEAUTIPUL BUT POOR 
No. 47-SADIA THE ROSEBUD. 

No. 65-LAURA BRAYTON. 

These novels are among the best ever written 
by JULIA EDWARDS, and are enjoying an 
enormous sale. They are copyrighted and can 
be had only in THE SELECT SERIES. 


For sale by all Booksellers and News Agents, or will be sent, post- 
paid, to any address in the United States or Canada, on receipt of 
^rioe, 25 cents each, by 

STREET & SMITH, Publishers, 

r. 0. Box 2731. 81 BOSE STBEET, KE^T TOBK. 


THE COUNTY FAIR. 


By NEIL BURGESS. 

Written from the celebrated play now 
running its second continuous season in 
New York, and booked to run a jhird sea- 
son in the same theater. 

The scenes are among the New Hamp- 
shire hills, and picture the bright side of 
country life. The story is full of amusing 
events and happy incidents, something 
after the style of our “Old Homestead,” 
which is having such an enormous sale. 

^‘THE COUNTY FAIR” will be one 
of the great hits of the season, and should 
you fail to secure a copy you will miss a 
p) literary treat. It is a spirited romance of 
town and country, and a faithful repro- 
duction of the drama, with the same unique 
characters, the same graphic scenes, but 
with the narrative more artistically rounded, and completed than was 
possible in the brief limits of a dramatic representation. This touch- 
ing story effectively demonstrates that it is possible to produce a novel 
which is at once wholesome and interesting in every part, without the 
introduction of an impure thought cr suggestion. Read the following 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS: 

Mr. Neil Burgess has rewritten his play, “The County Fair,” in story form. It 
rounds out a narrative which is comparatively but sketched in the play. It only needs 
the first sentence to set going the memory and imagination of those who have seen the 
latter and whet the appetite for the rest of this lively conception of a live dramatist.— 
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 

As “The County Fair” threatens to remain in New York for a long time the general 

f mblic out of town may be glad to learn that the playwright has put the piece into print 
n the form of a story. A tale baaed upon a play may sometimes lack certain literarj 
qualities, but it never is the sort of thing over w’hich any one can fall asleep. For- 
tunately, “The County Fair” on the stage and in print is by the same author, so there 
can be no reason for fearing that the book misses any of the points of the drama which 
has been so successful — iV. Y. Herald. 

The idea of turning successful plays into novels seems to be getting popular. The 
latest book of this description is a story reproducing the action and incidents of Neil 
Burgess’ play, “The County Fair.” The tale, which is a romance based on scenes of 
home life and domestic joys and sorrows, follows closely the lines of the drama in 
story and lilot.— Chicago Daily News. 

Mr. Burgess’ amusing play, “The County Fair.” has been received with such favor 
that he has worked it over and expanded it into a novel of more than 200 pages. It will 
be enjoyed even by those who have never heard the play and still more by those who 
h&ve.— Cincinnati Times-Star. 

This touching story effectively demonstrates that it is possible to produce a novel 
which is at once wholesome and interestin>.- in every part, without the introduction of 
an impure thought or suggestion.— .4 lhan < Prp^-<f 

Street & Smith have issued “The County Fair.” This is a faithful reproduction of 
the drama of that name and is an affecting and vivid story of domestic life, joy and 
sorrow, and rural scenes.— San Francisco Call. 

This romance is written from the play of this name and is full of touching incidents. 
—^xtnsville JoumaL 

It is founded on the popular play of the same name, in which Neil Burgess, who te 
also the author of tne story, has achieved the dramatic success of the season.— Fail 
River Herald. 

Tlxo OolXMLt'V is No. 33 of “The Select Series,” for 

Bale by all Newsdealers, or will be sent, on receipt of price, 26 cents, to any 
ftddresB. postpaid, by STBEET & Publishers, 26-31 Bose sL, New York, j 


9ENMAN THOMPSON’S OLD HOMESTEAD. 


8TBEET & SMITH’S SELECT SEBIES No. 23. 


£*rice, S5 Oexits. 


Some Ooinions of the Press* 

♦♦As the probahllltles are remote of the play 'The Old nomebi/cid^ being 
■een anywhere but in large cities it is only fair that the story of the piece should 
be printed. Like most stories written from plays it contains a great deal which 
Is not said or done on the boards, yet it is no more verbose than such a story 
should be, and it gives some good pictures of the scenes and people who for a 
year or more have been delighting thousands nightly. Uncle Josh, Aunt Tiidy, 
Old Cy Prime, Reuben, the mythical Bill Jones, the sheriff and all the other char- 
acters are here, beside some new ones. It is to be hoped that the book wiil make 
a large sale, not only on its merits, but that other play owners may feel encour- 
aged to let their works be read by the many thousands who cannot hope to see 
them on the stage.”— iV. Y. Herald, June 2d. 

“ Denman Thompson’s ‘The Old Homestead’ Is a story'of clouds and sunshine 
alternating over a venerated home; of a grand old man, honest and blunt, who 
loves his honor as he loves his life, yet suffers the agony of the condemned in 
learning of the deplorable conduct of a wayward son; a story of country life, love 
and Jealousy, without an impure thought, and with the healthy flavor of the 
fields in every chapter. It is founded on Denman Thompson s drama of •The 
Old Homestead.’ ”—N. Y. Press, May 26Lh. 

" Messrs. Street & Smith, publishers of the New YorTc WeeTcly, have brought 
out in book-form the story of • The Old Homestead,’ the play which, as produced 
by Mr. Denman Thompson, has met with such wondrous success. It will proba- 
bly have a great sale, chus Justifying the foresight of the publishers in giving the 
drama this permanent fiction form.”— A. Y. Morning Journal, June 2d. 

“The popularity or Denman Thompson’s play of • The Old Homestead’ has 
encouraged Street & Smith, evidently with his permission, to publish a good-sized 
novel with the same title, set in the same scenes and including the same charac- 
ters and more too. The book is a fair match for the play in the simple good taste 
and real ability with which It is written. The publishers are Street & Smith, and 
yiey have gotten the volume up in cheap popular form.”— A’, Y. Graphic, May 29. 

“Denman Thompson’s play, ‘The Old Homestead,’ is familiar, at least by rep 
utatlon, to every play-goer In the country. Its truth to nature and its simpis 
pathos have been admirably preserved in this story, which is founded upon it 
and follows its Incidents closely. The requirements of the stag- make the action 
a little hurried at times, but the scenes described are brought before the mind’s 
eye with remarkable vividness, and the portrayal of life in the little New Eng- 
land town Is almost perfect. Those who have never seen the play can get an 
excellent idea of what it is like from the book. Both are free from sentlmentallt” 
and sensation, and are remarkably healthy in XjonQ."— Albany Express, 

“Denman Thompson’s ‘Old Homestead’ has been put into story -form ana \a Is- 
sued by Street & Smith. The story will somewhat explain to those who have not 
seen it the great popularity of the play.”— .sroofcfi/n Times, June 8th. 

“The fame of Denman Thompson’s play, ‘Old Homestead,’ is world-wide. 
Tens of thousands have enjoyed it, and frequently recall the pure, lively pleasure 
they took in its representation. This is the story told in narrative form as well 
ES It was told on the stage, and will be a treat to all, whether they ha^e seen the 
play or not,."— National Tribune, Washington, D. C. 

“Hero we have the shaded lanes, the dusty roads, the hilly pastures, the 
peaked roofs, the school-house, and the familiar faces of dear old Swanzey, and 
the story which, dramatized, has packed the largest theater in New York, and 
has been a success everywhere because of its true and sympathetic touches of 
nature. All the incidents which have held audiences spell- bound are here re- 
corded— the accusation of robbery directed against the Innocent boy, his shame, 
and leaving home ; the dear old Aunt Tilda, who has been courted lor thirty 
years by the mendacious Cy Prime, who has never had the courage to propose ; 
the fall of the country boy into the temptations of city life, and his recove^ by 
the good Oldman who braves the metropolis to And him. The story embodies sA 
^t the play tells, and aU that it suggests as welL ”— Oitti JoumA 
luyDTtht 


The Select Series 

OF 


Popular American Copyright Stories. 



79— THE GAY CAPTAIN, by 

Mrs. M. V. Victor 25 

78— VASHTI’S FATE; or, 
PURIFIED BY FIRE, by 

Helen Corwin Pierce 25 

77— THE THREE BLOWS ; 
or, LOVE, PRIDE AND 
REVENGE, by Earl Drury. 25 
76— A PROUD DISHONOR, 

by Genie Holtzmeyer 25 

75— THE WIDOWED BRIDE, 
by Lucy Randall Comfort... 25 
74— THE GRINDER PAPERS, 

by Mary Kyle Dallas 25 

73-BORN TO COMMAND, 

by Hero Strong 25 

72— A MODERN MIRACLE, 

by James Franklin Fitts 25 

71— THE SWEET SISTERS 
OF INCHVARRA, by Annie 
Ashmore 25 


No. 70— HIS OTHER WIFE, by Rose Ashleigh 25 

No. 69— A SILVER BRAND, by Charles T. Manners 25 

No. 68— ROSLYN’S TRUST, by Lucy C. LUUe 25 

No. 67— WILLFUL WINNIE, by Harriet Sherburne 25 

No. 66-ADAM KENT’S CHOICE, by Humphrey EUiott 25 

No. 65 — LAURA BRAYTON, by Julia Edwards 25 

No. 64— YOUNG MRS. CHARNLEIGH, by T. W. Hanshew.c 25 

No. 63-BORN TO BETRAY, by Mrs. M. V. Victor 25 

No. 62— A STRANGE PILGRIMAGE, by Mrs. J. H. Walworth 25 

No. 61— THE ILLEGAL MARRIAGE, by Hon. Evelyn Ashby 25 

No. 60— WON ON THE HOMESTRETCH, by Mrs. M. C. Williams 25 

No. 59 — WHOSE WIFE IS SHE? by Annie Lisle 25 

No. 58 — KILDHURM’S OAK, by Julian Hawthorne 25 

No. 57— STEPPING-STONES, by Marion Harland 25 

No. 56— THE DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT, by Mary A. Denison 28 

No. 55 — ROXY HASTINGS, by P, Hamilton Myers.... 25 

No. 54 — THE FACE OF ROSENFF)L, by C. H. Montague 25 

No. 53— THAT GIRL OF JOHNSON’S, by Jean Kate Ludlum 25 

No. 52— TRUE TO HERSELF, by Mrs. J. H. Walworth 25 

No. 51— A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN’S SIN, by Hero Strong 25 

No. 50 — MARRIED IN MASK, by Mansfield Tracy Walworth 25 

No. 49— GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY, by Mrs. M. V. Victor 25 

No. 48— THE MIDNIGHT MARRIAGE, by A. M. Douglas 26 

No. 47— SADIA THE ROSEBUD, by Julia Edwards 26 


The Select Series. 

(OorLtinned.) 

5o. 46— A MOMENT OF MADNESS, by Charles J. Bellamy 26 

No. 45— WEAKER THAN A WOMAN, by Charlotte M. Brame 25 

No. 44— A TRUE ARISTOCRAT, by Mrs. Georgie Sheldon 26 

No. 43— TRIXY, by Mrs. Georgia Sheldon 26 

No. 42— A DEBT OF VENGEANCE, by Mrs. E. Burke Collins 25 

No. 41 -BEAUTIFUL RIENZI, by Annie Ashmore 25 

No. 40— AT A GIRL’S MERCY, by ean Kate Ludlum 25 

No. 39— MARJORIE DEANE, by Bertha M. Clay 25 

No. 38— BEAUTIFUL, BUT PO''R, by Julia Edwards 26 

No. 37— IN LOVE’S CRUCIBLT by Bertha M. Clay 25 

No. 86— THE GIPSY’S DAUGHTER, by Bertha M. Clay 25 

No. 35 — CECILE’S MARRIAGE by Lucy R«' dall Comfort 25 

No. 34— THE LITTL' WIDOW, by Julia Edwards 25 

No. 83— THE COUNTY FAIR, by NeU Burgess 25 

No. 82— LADY RYHOPE’S LOVER, by Emma G. Jones 26 

No. 31 — MARRIED FOR GOLD, by Mrs. E. Burke Collins 26 

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ZJo. 28-A HEART’S IDOL, by Bertha M. Clay 25 

No. 27— WINIFRED, by Mary Kyle Dallas 2.5 

No. 26 — FONTELROY, by Francis A. Durivage 25 

No. 25— THE KING’S TALISMAN, by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr 25 

No. 24 — THAT DOWDY, by Mrs. Georgie Sheldon 25 

No. 23— DENMAN THOMPSON’S OLD HOMESTEAD 25 

No. 22— A HEART’S BITTERNESS, by Bertha M. Clay 25 

No. 21 — THE LOST BRIDE, by Clara Augusta 25 

No. 20 — INGOMAR, by Nathan D. Urner 25 

No. 19— A LATE REPENTANCE, by Mrs. Mary A. Denison 25 

No. 18— ROSAMOND, by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller 25 

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No. 14— FLORENCE FALKLAND, by Burke Brentford 25 

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No. 11 — BADLY MATCHED, by Mrs. Helen Corwin Pierce 25 

No. 10— OCTAVIA’S PRIDE, by Charles T. Manners 25 

No. 9-THE WIDOW’S WAGER, by Rose Ashleigh 25 

No. 8— WILL SHE WIN? by Emma Garrison Jones 26 

No. 7 — GRATIA’S TRIALS by Lucy Randall Comfort 26 

No. 6— A STORMY WEDDING;, by Mrs. Mary E. Bryan., 25 

No. 6— BRUNETTE AND BLONDE, by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller 25 

No. 4— BONNY JEAN, by Mrs. E. Burke Collins 25 

No. 3— VELLA VERNELL; or, AN AMAZING MARRIAGE, by Mrs. Sumner 

Hayden 25 

No. 2 — A WEDDED WIDOW, by T. W. Hanshew 25 

No. 1— THE SENATOR’S BRIDE, by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh MiUer 25 

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No. 1— The Album -Writer’s Assistant 10 

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No. 5— How to Behave in Society 10 

No. 6— Amateur’s Manual of Photography 10 

No. 7— Out-Door Sports 10 

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No. 30— Amateur and Professional Oarsman’s Manual. By 

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OB' 


POPULAR AMERICAN COPYRIGHT NOVELS, 

BY NOTABLE AUTHORS, 

r^a-o. 4. 



OR, 

THE WEAVEE’S WAR. 


By PROFESSOR WM. HENRY PECK, 

AUTHOR OP 

"MarUn Marduke,” “£15,000 Reward,” “Siballa, 
the Sorceress,” etc. 

From the very opening paragraph this powerful and'lntensely exciting 
romance enchains the attention and keeps curiosity constantly active. The 
scene opens in the manufacturing center of Lyons, during a troublesome 
period in her history, when the laboring classes strove to maintain theil 
. rights against the nobility. The hero, whom fate has made an humble 
workman, finds opportunity for the display of those self-asserting qualities, 
which always force their possessor to the front in every contest. WTiilo 
most of the action is thrilling and dramatic, a captivating love episode is 
adroitly interwoven with the main thread of the romance. The mystery 
appertaining to the early life of the Locksmith, the appalling accusation 
Which makes him the victim of unseen foes, his fortitude in the most trying 
positions, and his final vindication and reward, are forcibly and sympatheti* 
cally set forth in this well constructed story. 


RRICE, S5 CICNTS 


STREET & SMITH, Publishers, 

, P. O. B.Z, 8784. _ ** “OSB STKBBT, N.W T.Ik. 


Jl^e S<^a a^d St^ore Seri(^5. 


Best Novels by Popular Authors. 


The Tragedy iu the Rue de la Paix. By Adolphe Belot. . No. 37 

The Woman of Fire. By Adolphe Belot No. 36 

Toilers of the Sea. By Victor Hugo No. 35 

Roinauce of a Poor Young Man. By Octave Feuillet No. 34 

Han of Iceland. By Victor Hugo No. 33 

She Trusted Him. By a popular author No. 32 

Carmen. By Prosper Merimee No. 31 

John Needham’s Double. By Joseph Hatton No. 30 

Sappho. By Alphonse Daudet No. 29 

Texas Jack. By Ned Buntline No. 28 

Camille. By Alexaudre Dumas, flls No. 27 

Red Dick, the Tiger of California. By Ned Buntline No. 26 

Dashing Charlie. By Ned Buntline No. 25 

Led Astray. By Octave Feuillet. . No. 24 

The Two Orpiians. By Adolphe D’Ennery No. 23 

The Struggle for Maverick, By J. F. Fitts No. 22 

Rocky Mountain Sam. By Burke Brentford No. 21 

The House of Silence. By Dr. J. H. RoPinson No. 20 

The Irish Monte Cristo’s Trail. By Alex. Robertson, M.D. No. 19 

The Yankee Champion. By Sylvanus Cobb, Jr No. 18 

Fedora. From the famous play, by Victorien Sardou No. 17 

Siballa, the Sorceress. By Prof. Wm. Henry Peck No. 16 

Tlie Golden Eagle. By Sylvanus Cobb, Jr No. 15 

The Fortune-Teller of Neiv Orleans. By Prof. W. H. Peck. No. 14 
'I'lie Irish Monte Cristo Abroad. By Alex. Robertson, M.D. No. 13 

Held for Ransom. By Lieut. Murray No. 12 

'I’lie Irish Monte Cristo’s Search. By Alex. Robertson, M.D. No. 11 
La Tosca. From the celebrated play, by Victorien Sardou. . . No. 10 

The Man in Blue. By Mary A. Denison No. 9 

Ben Hamed. By Sylvanus Cobb, Jr No. 8 

Ruy Bias. By Victor Hugo No. 7 

The 3Iasked Lady. By Lieutenant Murray No. 6 

Theodora, From the celebrated play, by Victorien Sardou.. No. 5 

The Locksmith of Lyons. By Prof. Wm. H. Peck No. 4 

The Brown Princess. By Mrs. M. V. Victor No. 3 

The Silver Ship. By Lewis Leon No. 2 

An Irish Monte Cristo No. 1 

For sale by all Booksellers and Newsdealers, or will be sent, postage 
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by the publishers, STREET & SMITH, 

P. 0. Box 2734. 26, 27, 29 and 31 Bose Street, New York. 


Sl^e ^er\jiee 


No. 46-THE DETECTITE’S TRIUMPH. By Emile Gaboriau 26 

No. 45-THE DETECTIVE’S DILEMMA. By Emile Gaboriau 25 

No. 44— THE BED LOTTERY TICKET. By Fortune Du Boisgobey 26 

No. 43— THE CHAMPDOCE MYSTERY. By Emile Gaboriau 25 

No. 42— CAUGHT IN THE NET. By Emile Gaboriau 25 

No. 41— MABEL SEYMOUR. By Charles Matthew 26 

No. 40— RUBE BURROWS’ LEAGUE. By Marline Manly 25 

No. 39— THE VESTIBULE LIMITED MYSTERY. By Alex. Robertson, M.D. 25 

No. 38— THE LOS HUECOS MYSTERY. By Eugene T. Sawyer 25 

No. 37— A WOMAN’S HAND. By Nick Carter 25 

No. 36— THE GREAT TRAVERS CASE. By Dr. Mark Merrick 26 

No. 35--3IUERTALMA ; or, The Poisoned Pin. By Marmaduke Dey 25 

No. 34— DETECTIVE BOB BRIDGER. By R. M. Taylor 26 

No. 33— OLD SPECIE. By Alex, Robertson, M. D 25 

No. 32— ADVENTURES AND EXPLOITS OP THE YOUNGER BROTHERS. By 

Henry Dale 26 

No. 31— A CHASE ROUND THE WORLD. By Mariposa Weir 25 

No. 30-GOLD-DUST DARRELL. By Burke Brentford 25 

No. 29 -THE POKER KING. By Marline Manly 25 

No. 28— BOB YOUNGER’S FATE. By Edwin S. Deane 25 

No. 27— THE REVENUE DETECTIVE. By Police Captain James 26 

No. 26— UNDER HIS THUMB. By Donald J. McKenzie 25 

No. 25— THE NAVAL DETECTIVE’S CHASE. By Ned Buutline 25 

No. 24— THE PRAIRIE DETECTIVE. By Leaiider P. Richardson 25 

No. 23— A MYSTERIOUS CASE. By K. P. Hill 25 

No. 22— THE SOCIETY DETECTIVE. By Oscar Maitland 26 

No. 21— THE AMERICAN MARIJUIS. By Nick Carter 25 

No. 20— THE MYSTERY OF A MADSTONE. By K. P. Hill 25 

No. 19— THE SWORDSMAN OP WARSAW. By Tony Pastor 26 

No. 18— A WALL STREET HAUL. By Nick Carter 25 

No. 17— THE OLD DETECTIVE’S PUPIL. By Nick Carter. 26 

No. 16-THE MOUNTAINEER DETECTIVE. By Clayton W. Cobb 26 

No. 15— TOM AND JERRY. By Tony Pastor 25 

No. 14— THE DETECTIVE’S CLEW. By “Old Hutch” 25 

No. 13— DARKE DARRELL. By Frank H. Stauffer 26 

No. 12— THE DOG DETECTIVE. By Lieutenant Murray 26 

No. 11— THE MALTESE CROSS. By Eugene T. Sawyer 25 

No. 10— THE POST-OFFICE DETECTIVE. By George W. Goode 26 

No. 9— OLD MORTALITY. By Young Baxter 26 

No. 8— LITTLE LIGHTNING. By Police Captain James 25 

No. 7— THE CHOSEN MAN. By Judson R. Taylor 25 

No. 6— OLD STONEWALL. By Judson R. Taylor 25 

No. 5— THE MASKED DETECTIVE. By Judson R. Taylor 25 

No. 4— THE TWIN DETECTIVES. By K. F. Hill 25 

No. 3-VAN, THE GOVERNMENT DETECTIVE. By “Old Sleuth” 26 

No. 2— BBUCE ANGELO, THE CITY DETECTIVE. By “Old Sleuth” 25 

No. 1— BRANT ADAMS, THE EMPEROR OP DETECTIVES. By “Old Sleuth” 25 

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THE SELECT SERIES 

OF 

POPULAR AMERICAN COPYRIGHT STORIES. 


GLADYS GREYE, by Bertha M. Clay No. 87 

BEAUTIFUL BUT DANGEROUS, by T. W. Hanshew •. No. 86 

WEDDED FOR AN HOUR, by Emma Garrison Jones No. 85 

LOST IN NEW YORK, by Burke Brentford No- 84 

ABIJAH BEANPOLE IN NEW YORK No. 83 

NOBODY’S DAUGHTER, by Clara Augusta No. 82 

A GODDESS IN EXILE, by Philip S. Warne No. 81 

THRICE WEDDED, BUT ONLY ONCE A WIFE, by Mrs. Sheldon No. 80 

THE GAY CAPTAIN, by Mrs. M. V. Victor No. 79 

VASHTI'S FATE; or, PURIFIED BY FIRE, by Helen Corwin Pierce No. 78 

THE THREE BLOWS, by Karl Drury No. 77 

A PROUD DISHONOR, by Genie Holtzmeyer No. 76 

THE WIDOWED BRIDE, by Lucy Randall Comfort No. 75 

THE GRINDER PAPERS, by Mary Kyle Dallas No. 74 

BORN TO COMMAND, by Hero Strong No. 73 

A MODERN MIRACLE, by James Franklin Fitts No. 72 

THE SWEET SISTERS OF INCHVARRA, by Annie Ashmore No. 71 

HIS OTHER WIFE, by Rose Ashleigh No. 70 

A SILVER BRAND, by Charles T. Manners No. 69 

ROSLYN’S TRUST, by Lucy C. Lillie No. 68 

WILLFUL WINNIE, by Harriet Sherburne No. 67 

ADAM KENT’S CHOICE, by Humphrey Elliott No. 66 

LAURA BRAYTON, by JuUa Edwards.” No. 65 

YOUNG MRS. CHARNLEIGH, by T. W. Hanshew No. 64 

BORN TO BETRAY, by Mrs. M. V. Victor No. 63 

A STRANGE PILGRIMAGE, by Mrs. J. H. Walworth No. 62 

THE ILLEGAL MARRIAGE, by Hon. Evelyn Ashby No. 61 

WON ON THE HOMESTRETCH, by Mrs. M. C. WUliams No. 60 

WHOSE WIFE IS SHE? by Annie Lisle No. 59 

KILDHURM’S OAK, by Julian Hawthorne No. 58 

STEPPING-STONES, by Marion Harland No. 57 

THE DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT, by Mary A. Denison No. 56 

ROXY HASTINGS, by P. Hamilton Myers No. 55 

THE FACE OF ROSENFEL, by C. H. Montague No. 54 

THAT GIRL OF JOHNSON’S, by Jean Kate Ludlum No. 53 

TRUE TO HERSELF, by Mrs. J. H. Walworth No. 52 

A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN’S SIN, by Hero Strong No. 51 

MARRIED IN MASK, by Mansfield Tracy Walworth No. 50 

GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY, by Mrs. M. V. Victor No. 49 

THE MIDNIGHT MARRIAGE, by A. M. Douglas No. 48 

SADIA THE ROSEBUD, by Julia Edwards No. 47 

A MOMENT OF MADNESS, by Charles J. Bellamy No. 46 

WEAKER THAN A WOMAN, by Charlotte M. Brame No. 45 

A TRUE ARISTOCRAT, by Mrs. Georgie Sheldon No. 44 

TRIXY, by Mrs. Georgie Sheldon No. 43 

ADEBTOF VENGEANCE, by Mrs. E. Burke Collins No. 42 

BEAUTIFUL RIENZI, by Annie Ashmore No. 41 

These popular books are large type editions, well printeil, well l)onnd. and 
in liandsoine covers. For sale by all Booksellers and Newsdealers ; or sent, 
postage free, on receipt of price, by the j)iiblishers, 

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Comprising translations of the best foreign fiction, together with the 
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4- Kathleen Douglas. By Julia Truitt Bishop ... 50 

5- Her Royal Lover. By Ary Ecilaw 50 

6- Jose. By Otto Ruppius 50 

7~Hls Word of Honor. By E. Werner 50 

8 -A Parisian Romance. By Octave Feuillet 50 

9— A Woman’s Temptation. By Bertha M. Clay 50 

10 -Stella Rosevelt. By 3Irs. Georgie Sheldon 50 

I I— Beyond Pardon. By Bertha M.Clay 50 

12 Lost A Pearle. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon 50 

13— The Partners. By Alphonse Baiidet 50 

l4~Sardou’s Cleopatra. By Victorien Sardou 50 

15— The Lone Ranch. By Capt. Mayne Reid 50 

16— Put Asunder. By Bertha M. Clay 50 

17— A Social Meteor. By Clement R. Marley 50 

18 The Chouans. By Honore de Balzac 

19 Sealed Lips. By Leon de Tinseau 

20 Between Two Loves. By Bertha M. 50 

21-Coralie’s Son. By Albert Delpit , . 50 - 

22 Martha, the Parson’s Daughter- By W. 

lleimburg .ri; . . - - — 50 

23— Jack. By Alphonse Baudet .^rly *^0 

24— The Master of EttersbergV By E. Werner . 50 

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26 Under a Shadow. By Bei#a M. Clay ,^>.50 

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STREET & SMITH, R|}B.hl?HERs‘ 

P. O. BOX 2734. 25-31 ROSf.STR&T:^ New YORK, 



















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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 


